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How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat
Author(s) -
Powers Nicholas
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american journal of economics and sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.199
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1536-7150
pISSN - 0002-9246
DOI - 10.1111/ajes.12248
Subject(s) - reactionary , presidency , power (physics) , white (mutation) , racism , aesthetics , sociology , manifesto , history , literature , art , law , political science , gender studies , politics , biochemistry , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , gene
Abstract A manifesto written in the form of a letter is a tradition in the African American canon, one that undergoes a radical revision in this essay. Whether in My Dungeon Shook , the first section of James Baldwin’s 1963 classic The Fire Next Time or Ta‐Nehisi Coates’s 2015 Between the World and Me , the strategy was a pedagogical one. The double work being done in these texts was to use a stated reader, in each case a family member, to grant the writer an intimacy that guaranteed the larger claims made on racism in America. Yet both writers seemed ultimately to elude that stated reader for a not too implicit, liberal white reader. In “How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat,” the text reverses this tactic to ask what a new life teaches us about racism and the desire for human connection it frustrates. The time frame is the end of the Obama presidency, where there was a hint of hope, even if it was betrayed. It ends shortly after November 2016 when white Americans chose a president who threatened to initiate a new neo‐Jim‐Crow era and asks: How does the endless, generative power of life teach a man of color to love during a politically reactionary time?