The Underground Railroad, Edited by Charles L. Blockson

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The Underground Railroad: First-Person Narratives of Escapes to Freedom in the North. Edited by Charles L. Blockson.

Blockson, an acknowledged expert on the Underground Railroad, grew up listening to his great-grandfather describe his own pre-civil war escape from slavery. The narratives are taken from first hand accounts given by the slaves themselves, published in the 19th century and draws heavily from the work of a 19th century black historian, William Still whose book Underground Railroad Records was published in 1872. The escape narratives are organized by state and are prefaced by a description of the history of the abolitionist movement in that region.

( Read more... )

The editor is the curator of the Afro-American Collection of Temple University.  He amassed the collection of rare books, photos, manuscripts and ephemera of the African Diaspora in the new world and donated it to the University. 

 

He edited another work of interest to members: A Commented Bibliography of One Hundred and One Influential Books by and about People of African Descent, 1556-1982, A. Gerits and Songs (Amsterdam), 1989.

Blonde Roots & Beacon Hill Boys

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Bernardine Evaristo "Blonde Roots" - 2/5

Doris Scagglethorpe, the daughter of a cabbage farmer, was ten years old when she's captured by slavers. Now twenty years later, she's trying to escape.

This is an interesting premise. Blacks (or blaks, as they are inexplicably called in the book (more on that later)) are the dominant race and whites (whytes) are the ones enslaved. It's not an alternate history, nor is it a fantasy set in another world. I'm not really sure what it is, or what it wants to be, and that was the problem for me.

( Cut for length, not for spoilers )

Ken Mochizuki "Beacon Hill Boys" - 2/5

It's 1972 and Dan Inagaki is a pretty average kid, decent grades, but a bit of a slacker. Compared to his older brother, Brad, though, who's perfect at everything, Dan is a total loser, especially in the eyes of his family. They also don't like the way he stands up for himself and for Asian Americans in general, demanding Asian American history be taught in school and books about Asian Americans be added to the library. Better to keep your head down and avoid pissing people off.

( Cut for length, not for spoilers )

Also, for those who might be interested, I have reviews of The Taqwacores and The Story of a Marriage on my journal, both of which are about PoC, but by white authors. Both were really well-done, IMO.

Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots

[sanguinity]

41. Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots.

Oh, this was awesome. :-D

For some reason, I had been expecting a straight-up specfic-nal alternate history. It's not, however: it's satire all the way. (Or put this way: it's as much a coherent alternate universe as Pratchett's Discworld is -- i.e., it makes no sense unless you're conversant in the dominant explanatory narratives of our world, and it only makes "sense" as a commentary on those narratives.) The very first sentence of Blonde Roots tipped me off to that -- here is a a world where Aphrikans are the imperial powers and whytes are slaves, but in which the beverage "rum and coke" -- Coca-Cola Corporation? really? -- exists. This can't be an alternate history. Even so, it still took me a chapter or so to stop fighting the implausibilities of the world (implausibilities which had been never meant to be plausible!) and slip mental gears into satire-through-AU.

(I'd still advise to skip the map in the forepages, though. That thing, with its Italy on a Polar ocean, like to broke my brain. The only thing you need to know about the map is that the British nation-state has been separated from the ethnic identities of England, Scotland, and Wales. The island of Great Britain is now the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa and is positioned off the Aphrikan coast; the ethnic English, Scottish, and Welsh peoples are still a part of Europa. That's an impressively sweet little bit of footwork on Evaristo's part: she can keep the British Empire on the satirical hook for its colonial outrages by having it be part of the Aphrikan power structure, even while she uses our expectations of how English culture "ought" to be spoken of to show us how screwily African cultures are spoken of. Too many "imagine the roles were reversed" narratives can devolve into allowing white people look away from things their cultures actually did, while helping them fantasize about having been themselves oppressed; Evaristo sidesteps that nicely here.)

(Also, using satire instead of a straight-up AU also effectively sidesteps the we-too-could-have-been-oppressed fantasy. When Doris Scagglethorpe (hee!) fantasizes about cabbages, cabbages, vermin in the thatch, and cabbages, it's so obviously tongue-in-cheek that a white reader can't descend into a help-I'm-being-oppressed fantasy. Others on this comm have long expressed fangirl-squee for Evaristo: on the basis of this single novel, I concur.)

There are essentially three interlinked satirical worlds here: a whyte house-slave in an imperial city (which, for whatever it's worth, could about as easily be set in the American South); the "I worked for everything I have; we're doing them a favor by enslaving them" worldview of the Aphrikan slaveowners; and a hybridized whyte/Aphrikan Caribbean slave culture. There's not a lot of plot here (of which I was glad -- the book was slowest where it got most plot-like). Instead, the book spends the bulk of its time exploring its satirical worlds, using both humor and horror to navigate them. (Purely technical aside: how does she do that? How does she keep the humorous satirical stuff from cheapening the horror she wove in?)

Anyway, the book makes me wish I was far better-read, because I know I'm not nearly getting all the references, but what I do get makes me grin. Some of the satire is "just" obvious role-inversion -- pointing out how ridiculously ethnocentric our beauty standards are by reversing them -- but other things are jabs at genre conventions or current social trends. (Like that thing in nineteenth century novels where no matter where you went in the world, you run into the same six people! And "field wiggers," f'rex, is a clear jab at the "everything but the burden" white culture vultures -- if you want to be a 'wigger,' then be a wigger and take the historical burden, too! Oh, wait -- you can't!) And then there's the Gaiman-esque moments of making verbal imagery literal: I too remember being confused as a child about how few Underground Railroad books seemed to mention either the railroad part or the underground part.

Let me share one of my favorite moments: a passage mocking the faux-oppression of the privileged. Near the end of the book, Doris, who has gone through incredible physical and emotional pain -- violently separated from her family as a child; her own children sold away from her; beaten savagely; working long, brutal hours in the cane fields; and all throughout having had to pretend unfettered adoration the masters that she hates and despises -- is in the master's house and spies a locked cupboard with the key still in:

...I opened it, and found myself on a trip into Nonso's mind.

Self-help books were stacked on shelves, loads of them:

They F**k You Up--How to Survive Family Life
Healing Your Inner Child
How to Start a Conversation & Make Friends
Dealing with People You Can't Stand
How to Motivate Your Workforce

Hidden away at the bottom, spines turned inward: Inheritance Tax for Dummies and Curing VD the Natural Way.

Not a single book had a creased spine.

I had to laugh.

I had to laugh, too.

7-8: Audre Lorde, Samuel R. Delaney

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Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

in short: Audre Lorde was among other things a black West Indian(-American) lesbian radical feminist, who in feminist circles at least, is best known for the speech “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” and was a great advocate of intersectionality in feminism. Her autobiography, which I am in the middle of reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is one of the many books that has been Amazon Rank'd.

She also wrote poetry.

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Delany, Samuel R. They Fly at Ciron.

in short: A short sf/f novel about a military campaign on a small village. The regularly peaceful villagers must turn to the mysterious Winged One who live high in the mountains for help.

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1. The Hakawati and 2. The Uncultured Wars

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Hi! This is my first post; my goal for my reading is *not* to make all of the books I read by people of color this year by/about Arab-Americans. It would be an easy out, since I'm writing my dissertation about the Arab community in New York, so I'm going to try my best to make it more diverse than that.


1. The Hakawati - Rabih Alameddine

( Queer multi-narrative novel set in, among other places, Lebanon... )

2. The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - Steven Salaita

( Essays on Arabs and Liberal Movements and Politics in the US )