International Socialist Review
by Jesse Allen
http://isreview.org/issue/63/missing-malcolm
Approaches to Life Writing, Fall 2013
The course site for MALS 70900
October 2, 2013
“Keep Your Wives Away from Them”: Queer Jewish Women’s Life Writing
by Jenn Polish
from outsmartmagazine.com
One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, Keep Your Wives Away from Them is an anthology of queer Jewish women’s writing about their personal journeys with Judaism and queerness. One of my best friend’s sisters wrote a piece for this work, which is how I heard about it. Therein lies one of the things that’s so magical about a lot of community-specific life writing: you learn about it through your community and it comes to validate so much of your or your chosen family’s lives.
Too often, narrative space is dominated by straight cis men, and too often in queer communities – perhaps especially Jewish queer communities, of which I am a part – gay cis men dominate both narrative space and social space. Keep Your Wives Away from Them – a bone-chillingly powerful title for anyone whose family’s (or whose chosen families’ non-chosen families) have heard this warning from rabbis and listened – breaks open an opportunity for queer Jewish women to, for once, occupy the fore in the narrative.
Because of my position in life, I can’t know for sure if reading this would be accessible to people without intimate knowledge of queer Jewish worlds, though everything in it is incredibly written. However, I imagine that the strength of the writing alone can open proverbial doors to Shabbos meals and first hugs even for people whose life experiences don’t include an understanding of the power of these things.
October 2, 2013
Reviews of Marable’s Biography
by Jenn Polish
from colorlines.com
Hey folks,
I’ve found some reviews (the first ones that came up in a search) of Marable’s biography of Malcolm X. Below I’m including both the links and some highlights (both interesting and gut-wrenching) from the articles, in case you don’t have time to sift through them.
See you in class!
Negative review of Malcolm X bio is rejected: “ ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ is an abomination,” wrote reviewer Karl Evanzz. “It is a cavalcade of innuendo and logical fallacy, and is largely reinvented from previous works on the subject.”
Peeling Away Multiple Masks: Interesting phrasing here: because all biographies do, really, make an argument, even though we often claim they don’t… “Mr. Marable argues that Malcolm X was a gifted performer, adept at presenting himself to black audiences “as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.””
Malcolm X by Manning Marable – review: “One of the great shibboleths of American thought puts Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as reconciling opposites: Martin v Malcolm, the integrationist apostle of non-violence versus the separatist demagogue, coming to a dialectical synthesis near the end of their lives. Marable evokes this dualism while implicitly rejecting it.”
The Malcolm X you don’t know: Manning Marable’s new book is stirring up old controversies: “Any high-quality work that comes out of the world of ethnic studies, or is focused on ethnic concerns, is more often than not a condemnation of the entire field. The problem is not the interest itself, but the tendency to tilt more toward indoctrination than education, self-pitying myth rather than the facts and nuances of human life, which are never as simple as a placard.”
Manning Marable’s ‘Reinvention’ Of Malcolm X: “Marable also explores the question of Malcolm X’s homosexual relationship with a white businessman. “It can be read as salacious or titillating to make this claim,” Harris-Perry said. But Marable “doesn’t necessarily say that Malcolm is a gay man. He is suggesting that Malcolm at certain points in his life engages in sexual activity with men and particularly this man — but he frames it around economic need and social anxiety.””
And for more fun, a tribute to Manning Marable from one of my favorite websites, Colorlines.com.
