POST 2. History is a tale of many ‘Accidents.’ Today I’m thinking of something one can call ‘Accidental Political Blackness.’ Accidental Political Blackness is a part of my history. And a part of brown people’s history. Tomorrow is Juneteenth. On June 19th, 1865, Major Gen. Gordon Granger came to Galveston, TX to inform slave-owners that President Lincoln had actually freed all slaves TWO YEARS before that. The slave-owners were incensed, horrified, terrified, mortified, but compelled to obey. Still, they got those two extra years of political whiteness. ‘Accident’ of history, one might say, at least of History as written by…
Category: Africa
Autobiography of Political Blackness
This series will be about my connection as a South Asian-American to Political Blackness, a term now in use to describe solidarity across races.
Who Fears Death? Not Nnedi Okorafor’s heroine!
Language fails before the scale of the violence and the atrocity so that the witness must shapeshift in order to make sense of a reality that is truly protean in its torments and terrors.
The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
The world that Byrne has created is intensely brittle, manipulated, multidimensional and polymorphous, but less focus on the possibilities of pastiche and paranormality and a little more on the meaning and yield even of shifting positions and subjectivities in a compressed time-space would have made the novel more readable and enjoyable.
Review of Jeffery Colvin’s Africaville
Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin Africaville is, to put it briefly, stunning. It took me some time to grasp the reasons for the diffuseness of the book’s events, characters, and topography. Frankly, names and places seemed to be jostling, crowding one another too closely, sending things out of focus. After reading more, though, and noting the peripatetic lives of so many characters in the community — living or dead — I began to realize that the mode is the matter. The diffuseness of the telling gestures at the displacement and movements of the African diaspora, with corners and nooks of the…
One Planet, Only One 
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