Going Too Far
Essays About America's Nervous Breakdown
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Ishmael Reed goes too far, again! Just as the fugitive slaves went to Canada and challenged the prevailing view that slaves were well off under their masters, Ishmael Reed has gone all the way to Quebec—where this book is published—to challenge the widespread opinion that racism is no longer a factor in American life.
In some ways, says Reed, the United States very much resembles the country of the 1850s. The representations of blacks in popular culture are throwbacks to the days of minstrelsy. Politicians are raising stereotypes about blacks reminiscent of those that the fugitive slaves found it necessary to combat: that they are lazy and dependent and need people to manage them.
Ishmael Reed establishes his diagnosis of a nervous breakdown in three parts. Part I on a black president of the United States is entitled “Chief Executive and Chief Exorcist, Too?” Part II on culture and representations of African Americans in our supposed post-race era, “Coonery and Buffoonery.” In Part III, “As Relayed by Themselves,” cultural figures have a chance to tell the story in their own words.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of previously published essays, interviews, and skits, poet, novelist, and essayist Reed (Another Day at the Front) takes the opportunity to let off steam about issues both social (the persistence of racism) and personal (his Internet brawl with Salon.com's Joan Walsh over an op-ed column he wrote for the New York Times). Reed tackles the Tea Party's shockingly racist antics, Obama's accomplishments, feminism's effect on the black male image, the Occupy Movement to varying results. Reed is best when he historicizes, as in his essay "Ethnic Studies in the Age of the Tea Party," and when he draws on the more rational, even-tempered voices of others, as in his interviews with Terry McMillan and Nuruddin Farah. But when he does what he sets out to do go too far he is at his worst, as in his scathing essays on the film Precious. Many readers will find some affinity with Reed's work, but his rhetoric can be too inflammatory (he calls Tea Partiers the "T-shirts" "America's equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts," and derides "wealthy white progressive women") to comfortably digest which, presumably, is exactly as Reed would have it.
