Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about constructing a fascism in literature syllabus. Right now, I keep going back and forth on whether or not to focus specifically on American literature or to expand it and make it a world literature course. For this post, I am doing the latter because I feel that reading novels about fascism in a broader context … Read More Fascism in Literature Syllabus
When most people think about racism and oppression they think about the oppressed. They think about individuals who live under the heel of the oppressor. They think about the atrocities that the oppressor commits. They think about the acts of resistance against the oppressor. They do this and then they label it “the Negro problem” or “the Jewish question,” placing the onus of the … Read More “You, the white people, invented race”: Now Ask Yourself Why!
I am extremely anxious, but I have hope and I keep remembering we have been here before. We’ve had Eugene Talmadge here in Georgia. He was a fascist and racist. We had Father Coughlin. We had Gerald L.K. Smith. We had Charles Lindbergh. We had Joseph McCarthy. We’ve had . . . Our generation, going back to Kennedy, has not had this form of existential crisis that … Read More No Matter What Lies Ahead, I Maintain Hope
Since childhood, I’d been fed the constant patriotic narrative of World War II, imbibing the events in which the United States had direct involvement from Pearl Harbor to D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge and more. I never really veered from those stories until I started looking deeper into World War II a few years ago, specifically the connections between Jim Crow and the … Read More The Reverberations of World War II Syllabus
On a recent trip, I stopped for coffee in Monticello, Georgia, a small town with a population of around 2,500 about 60 miles southeast of Atlanta. As with many older, small towns, everything centered around the town square, a space with the courthouse, shops, an inn, and other businesses. The middle of the square, where the old courthouse once stood, had become a small … Read More The Juxtaposition of Memory in Public Space
Interminable Rambling 