A Black History Month Reading List to Re-imagine Trumpspeak America

A Black History Month Reading List to Re-imagine Trumpspeak America In an era of doublespeak, George Orwells 1984  has found new appeal for US readers. In response to White House alt-facts, readers  have reportedly flocked to  Orwells dystopic analysis of the perils of  Stalinism, set in a parallel post-WWII  Britain. Orwells book certainly has wide  appeal. Beyond its literary charms, it gives us a view on why people like us  fall in line with a  suffocating, autocratic system. Beyond 1984,  a number of  authors and book lovers have come up with more lists of what to read  in an era of Trumpspeak. Yet most of the listed works about fascist futures, resistance reading, and Trumptopias have been made up of  works by white writers. The current turn towards  militarist-laissez-faire nativism in the US surely borrows a good deal from  the KKK and  other anti-Reconstruction forces. Americas great black writers arent the only ones writing about these forces. But the seven books below are some of the greatest works grappling with a made-in-America doublefact. They aso show not just a catastropic collapse, but in the cracks other, better possibilities. The seven: Kindred, Octavia Butler.  If were going to talk about American doublespeak, we should certainly talk about establishing a land of the free in a nation where slavery was law. Kindred  takes place largely in the nineteenth-century slaveholding South.  But, through a bit of Butlerian magic, it also takes place in the 1970s, as its a mixed-race couple who is thrown back into the heart of American slavery. The novel  threads together disparate times in US history, and allows us  to rethink both present and past. Black Reconstruction in America,  W.E.B. DuBois.  After slavery, there was Reconstruction. Or, at least, an attempt at Reconstruction. This, too, was a time of doublethink, doublespeak, and a rising nativism. DuBoiss work is scholarship, but  it too encourages us to think through other possibilities. DuBoiss clear-eyed magnum opus was hardly appreciated in its time, and still stands as a great work of regular, good, decent  fact facts. Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead.  This brilliant book, published just last year, is a brilliant full-frontal look at American history that doesnt subscribe to the Manifest Destiny, up-by-our-bootstraps, forward-march approach of most American narratives. Instead of taking us forward in time, as though things always improve when we head through time,  it takes us  around different parts of America in a Swiftian journey, many of which are rife with alt-fact-speak. Home,  Toni Morrison. This 2012 novel, by Americas only living Nobel-literature laureate, centers around Korean War veteran Frank Money, who brings Americas external war home with him. This is a novel about how we fail to  understand each other, and the limits of empathy. But its also about the tragedies we enact elsewhere, and how these stories, and these words, become part of Americas story. The Healing, Gayl Jones. Told through an African-American autodidact faith healer. Here, in the face of fascist alt-facts, there is magic, healing, self-healing, and belief.     Parable of the Talents  and  Parable of the Sower,  Octavia Butler.  Seven Stories Press is re-issuing these two books, with gorgeous new covers, for obvious reasons. These are Butlers two books that show how America descends into MAGA madness, centered on  a Texas-bred presidential candidate who uses the slogan Make America Great Again (yes, really) as a siren call  to his movement toward populist-nativist-misogynist-racism. But  then, beautifully,  The Parable of the Sower  also shows  how the country finds its way out. Although there are no red hats emblazoned with MAGA, and a few other things depart from 2017, theres  plenty thats  familiar among the fantastic worlds of militias that act out their Christian-nativist fantasies and bring back slavery. But Butler is never a writer of defeat, and, when reading her very bleakest scenarios, the reader always knows there will be a  counterpoint of creation.