The Breaks
An Essay
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.
SEMINARY CO-OP'S BEST BOOKS OF 2021
In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.
"The Breaks is amazing—I read the whole thing through in one sitting. It’s got the heft and staying power of Baldwin’s 'A Letter to My Nephew.'" —Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism
“If a book can be a hole cut in the side of an existence in order to escape it, or to find a way through what is otherwise impassable, then this is that kind of book … How will we live in the new space that we keep making, through refusal but also adjustment, the necessary accommodations to the ‘nowhere and nothing’ that this space also is? The Breaks leads us through such moments, questions, and scenes, with tenderness. And deep care.” —Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart
“This is a lens-shifting book, an immeasurable gift. With poignant, aching, beautiful, and deeply loving prose, Singh brings Brown girls into the sun, and makes you want to change the ways of the world for our young people and for us all.” —Imani Perry, author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
“Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, on No Archive Will Restore You
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a kind of spiritual successor to the genre-defying No Archive Will Restore You, Singh, an associate professor of English and gender studies, reveals the most intimate details of her life and politics. Using the form of a letter to her daughter, Singh offers "alternative histories... of those who have faced annihilation and lived toward survival" in the face of Western capitalism's "wholesale destruction of the earth," and criticizes the "dominant narratives" that have shaped mainstream culture—such as Disney's painting of Indigenous peoples as "savage" and the white man as "fundamentally good" in the movie Pocahontas. To go "against the grain" of these racist depictions, Singh recalls her youth fighting discriminatory aggression as a mixed "Brown" child in the "purportedly multicultural Canada of the 1980s," her lifelong endurance of bodily and medical trauma, and the home she's created with her partner—as "queer collaborators" who play "with what constitutes family." Singh has a tendency to wax academic, but that doesn't detract from the beauty of her insights as she exquisitely links theory and poetics to her own fears, insecurities, and certainty that one day her child will need to break away from her. This is a stunning work.
