The Souls of Mixed Folk [Review: Samatar]Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2012-02-07 02:00Z by Steven |
The Souls of Mixed Folk [Review: Samatar]
Sofia Samatar
2012-02-05
This book, by Stanford professor Michele Elam, comes at you with a provocative title and a provocative cover.
The title, a reference to the brilliant and still relevant 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is provocative because it could be read as trivializing a classic of African-American literature and cultural theory. The cover, which shows an image of “Baby Halfie Brown Head” by artist Lezley Saar, is provocative because of the way it presents a mixed-race body as a creepy, freakish-looking doll.
If you are bothered by these things, you should keep reading Elam’s book. She explains very quickly that she doesn’t mean to trivialize Du Bois: her title comes from a frame in Nate Creekmore’s comic strip, Maintaining, and she chose it for a number of good reasons, among them a wish “to both evoke and unsettle expectations, to prepare the reader for examples of art, literature, comics, and drama that collectively reframe…conversations about the ‘spiritual strivings’ of mixed race people.” The disturbing doll on the cover is meant to play a similar role. Elam writes: “Politically incorrect in an age seeking to answer ever more earnestly the philosophical and democratic problem of ‘the one and the many,’ its body will not deliver the desired whole.”…
Read the entire review here.