Front Table Newsletter 11/4

On this week’s Front Table, follow one family’s fight to protect their transgender child in rural America, and explore a poetic meditation on our tangled lives with objects. See how daily life and resistance unfold under occupation, and enter a Nigerian town reshaped by secrets and change. Consider the West’s history of conquest, encounter a fierce wind that binds nature and humanity, and imagine a new path toward a fairer, greener world. 

And the Dragons Do Come: Raising a Transgender Kid in Rural America
(The New Press)
Sim Butler

Our country stands at a critical cultural crossroads, with a wave of anti-trans legislation emerging at unprecedented levels, targeting trans children, in particular, who face increasing stigmatization and erasure. Sim Butler's And the Dragons Do Come is a poignant account of one family's experience of parenting and supporting a trans child against this nightmarish backdrop.

In recent years, the Butler family faced an impossible reality in their home state of Alabama, where trans rights are increasingly under attack. Butler recounts their family's struggles and sacrifices to protect their trans child against the barrage of state-sanctioned intolerance in the legal, educational, and health arenas.

Around the time she turned twelve, his daughter's personal struggles became political fodder. Along with other trans kids, she was outlawed from playing sports and forbidden to use the girls' bathroom. Another law made Butler and his wife felons for seeking trans-affirming health care for her. When her charter school was featured in several gubernatorial campaign ads, local community members began driving through the parking lot to yell at the trans kids.

Serving both as a compassionate story of one family's struggle for acceptance and as a window onto a fraught issue that parents, grandparents, other family members, and friends are confronting across the nation, And the Dragons Do Come provides a firsthand perspective on the human cost of anti-trans sentiment.

Groceries
(Fonograf Editions)
Nora Claire Miller

The winner of the 2023 Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize contest, as chosen by Srikanth Reddy, Groceries is a book-length poem about what to do about objects. On earth everyone is worried about objects--getting them, naming them, maintaining them, destroying them, getting rid of them. Some people say objects will be the end of life on earth. Other people say objects will save us, if we get the right ones.

But as we reckon with these object-mediated futures, we live on an earth full of the stuff itself: fax machines, horseshoes, waves. Groceries is a guide for what to do about these objects--how to speak to them and how to listen for a reply.

Making Death and Life in Palestine: Social Reproduction in Settler Colonialism
(Europa Editions)
Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson (Ed.)

Social reproduction theory examines how the daily renewal of human life, and thus human labor, is crucial to capitalism. Here, for the first time, the theory is applied to the setting of Palestine.

Israel's settler colonialism is premised on the destruction of Palestinian lives, undermining Palestinian social reproduction at every turn. That project, which ramped up after October 7, has terrible logic. By examining the concrete, historically specific details, the authors begin to reshape and refine the theory of Social Reproduction, shedding light on why Israel's assault is so brutal.

Chapters look at Israel's mass murder of a generation of Palestinians in Gaza, the effects of ecocide, the relationship between land dispossession and class, Israel's selective pronatalism, and scholasticide among other topics.

Before the Mango Ripens
(Dzanc Books)
Afabwaje Kurian

In Rabata, everyone has secrets--especially since the arrival of the white American missionaries.

Twenty-year-old Jummai is a beautiful and unassuming house girl whose dreams of escaping her home life are disrupted when an unexpected pregnancy forces her to hide her lover's identity. Tebeya, an ambitious Dublin-educated doctor, has left prestigious opportunities abroad to return to the small town of her birth, and discovers a painful betrayal when she strives to take control of the mission clinic. Zanya is a young translator, enticed by promises of progress, who comes to Rabata to escape a bitter past and finds himself embroiled in a fight against the American reverend for the heart of the church and town.

United by their yearning for change, all three must make difficult decisions that threaten the fragile relationships of the Rabata they know. As tensions mount and hypocrisies are unveiled, the people of Rabata are faced with a question that will transform their town forever: Let the Americans stay, or make them go?


Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest
(Basic Books)
William Easterly

For centuries, the developed Western world has exploited the less-developed "Rest" in the name of progress, conquering the Americas, driving the Atlantic slave trade, and colonizing Africa and Asia. Throughout, the West has justified this global conquest by the alleged material gains it brought to the conquered. But the colonial experiment unintentionally revealed how much of a demand there was for self-determination, and not just for relief from poverty.

In Violent Saviors, renowned economist William Easterly examines how the demand for agency has always been at the heart of debates on development. Spanning nearly four centuries of global history, Easterly argues that commerce, rather than conquest, could meet the need for equal rights as well as the need for prosperity. Looking to the liberal economic ideas of thinkers like Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Amartya Sen, Easterly shows how the surge in global trade has given agency to billions of people for the first time.

Narrating the long debate between conquest and commerce, Easterly offers a new and urgent perspective on global economics: the demands for agency, dignity, and respect must be at the center of the global fight against poverty.


 Helm: A Novel 
(Mariner Books)
Sarah Hall

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind -- a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time.

Through the stories of those who've obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm -- and the farmer's daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.

Rich, wild, and vital, Helm is the story of a singular life force, and of the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.


Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate
(Princeton University Press)
Dani Rodrik

Fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty are urgent global challenges, yet the world's leaders continue to pursue outdated policies that focus on one while worsening the tradeoffs between each of them. Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World shows how the nations of the world can achieve all three objectives.

Dani Rodrik provides a bold new vision of globalization, one in which we accelerate the green transition to achieve a sustainable planet, shore up the middle class to restore democracy's foundations, and hasten economic revitalization in the developing world to put an end to poverty. The rising tide of authoritarianism has demonstrated our inability to alleviate economic anxieties. Economic nationalism has raised the specter of increased protectionism and deteriorating prospects for economic growth. And automation and other new technologies have undercut the advantages of low-cost, unskilled labor in manufacturing and export-oriented industrialization. Rodrik reveals how we can restore prosperity through new forms of collaborative public-private action--to promote renewables and green industries, middle-class jobs, and enhanced productivity in labor-absorbing services--even in the absence of global cooperation. He explains why this new kind of globalization must also recognize the legitimate desire of governments to pursue their economic, social, and security interests autonomously.

Turning conventional economic wisdom on its head, Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World builds on practices that work while radically transforming those that don't, presenting a grounded, clear-eyed approach to tackling the problems that affect us all, at home and around the world.