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…

MODEL MINORITY

Frank Chin, playwright, said in 1974 something that might still apply today: “Whites love us because we’re not black.” There’s only one way to confront the term “Model Minority” in the United States, generally applied to Asians, including South Asians. That way is to understand it as the intentional and painstaking act of ‘modeling’ a minority in the image of the majority. That, Chin was saying, was what some Asians do or feel they must: stay as far away from blacks and hispanics as possible because then the white majority won’t get “spooked” by them. By the way, since the…

In praise of regional cuisine

In my next novel in progress, Homeland Blues, there’s a lot about food. Specifically Indian food. Exile from it. Diaspora marriages and communities built on it. Craving for it. Craving for regional soul food. For the pungency of flavors that make you temporarily stop breathing as they exact your love. And about perhaps nativist disdain among South Asians for the popular Indian restaurant brand “curry” foods palatable to Americans, and I’d say especially Americans, who tend to be adamant about the sanctity and primacy of American tastes (sorry Ameri ca but you can be tyrannical even outside politics). One of…