Front Table 9/29/2022

On this week's Front Table, explore the controversial histories that shape our future, from the fragile alliance between Black voters and the Democratic party to the challenged texts being brought into classrooms to confront the harm they invoke. Find the following and more at semcoop.com

Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future
(Macmillan)
Brandi Collins-Dexter

In this book, Brandi Collins-Dexter, former Senior Campaign Director for Color Of Change, explores the fragile alliance between Black voters and the Democratic party. Through sharp, timely essays that span the political, cultural, and personal, Collins-Dexter reveals decades of simmering disaffection in Black America, told as much through voter statistics as it is through music, film, sports, and the baffling mind of Kanye West. While Black Skinhead is an outward look at Black votership and electoral politics, it is also a funny, deeply personal, and introspective look at Black culture and identity, ultimately revealing a Black America that has become deeply disillusioned with the failed promises of its country.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings
(Basic Books)
Neil Price

The Viking Age saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval writers, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, and beliefs to the lands and peoples they encountered. 

I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole
(Macmillan)
Canetti, Elias

Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century’s foremost chroniclers: a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. The book is a summa of Canetti’s life and thought, and the definitive introduction to a writer whose genius for interpreting world-historical changes was matched by a keen sense of wonder and an abiding skepticism about the knowability of the self. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Bulgaria, Canetti later lived in Austria, England, and Switzerland while traversing, in writing, the great thematic provinces of his time: politics, identity, mortality, and more.Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen, I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole leads us from Canetti’s polyglot childhood to his mature preoccupations, and his friendships and rivalries with Hermann Broch, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and others.


Is Equality an Absolute Good?
(Paul Dry Books)
Eva Brann

The Declaration of Independence aimed to turn our continent from a British colony into an American nation. Yet its first, its primary claim, is that we are all individually equal. What’s that got to do with national independence? However, the Declaration’s claim of universal human equality has grown into our primary political passion. This brief book asks: What concrete, substantial good do we get out of this equality? Well, specific safety of our equality before the law. But beyond that, and the easement of our envy? Equality at work, equalizing, is a mere leveling relation. Whatever is worth having involves distinction, that's inequality.


Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher's Dilemma
(W.W. Norton & Company)
Deborah Appleman

Our current “culture wars” have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right—to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled—school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.


On the Inconvenience of Other People
(Duke University Press)
Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, On Inconvenience of Other People experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.


Samuel Fosso
(W.W. Norton & Company) 
Christine Barthe

Samuel Fosso is one of Central Africa’s leading contemporary photographers, whose playful and perceptive work investigates Pan-African identity and history through the use of portraiture. Fosso found his path to art-making through his early work as a commercial portrait photographer, using his leftover film to capture self-portraits against well-considered backdrops and incorporating pose, costume, and props. Renowned for his “autoportraits, Fosso reflects the world around him through a distinct aesthetic that has at times defied Nigerian dictatorial decree.Fosso’s work is now held in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate and he was the recipient of the Prince Claus Award of the Netherlands. Samuel Fosso, exhibits Fosso’s photographic opus through sixty full-page reproductions in a handsome and collectible pocket format.