That was the title of a review essay on Postethnic America and other books (W. B. Michaels’ Our America is one) by Eric Lott, almost 28 years ago when all these things were new. I kept my photocopy because I liked my underlinings and notes, and a lot of things, like the Amiri Baraka epigraph. Lott hadn’t yet published what he has now, and the review essay has glimmerings of his larger work. I was interested in those ideas for something I was doing then. These included:
* FLASH: IF _______ DOES NOT LIKE MY PIECE, I CAN SEND IT TO TRANSITION! Yes! But is this journal peer reviewed? ALSO FLASH: A Contracorriente, perhaps.
* the idea of polyethnic identities being all right as long as they were transcended y some national form of cultural cohesion; the idea that “class-not-race” is a form of liberalism; more.
* Werner Sollors published a book called Beyond Ethnicity in 1986
* “fluidity” passes for politics: it’s postmodern and required, as against the idea of collective unity; instead we get the fantasy of mobility and unlimited “options”
* Hollinger implies that Black radicalism is “reactionary”
* FLASH: the Brazilians I complained about in the 80s were not just saying super-retro (obviously retro) things, they were saying the “reasonable” white-male-liberal things these books say and Lott criticizes.
And there’s much more, but the piece is on JSTOR now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 