aimiller's Reviews (689)

I really really enjoyed this--it was concise and not boring, it created empathy and space for all kinds of experiences, and it's a trade history publication that talks directly about settler colonialism! I could see this being really incredibly useful in undergraduate courses or even just to start conversations with folks outside the academy (it could be a really excellent book club book, for example!) Obviously there are limitations to its scope, and I've read reviews about sourcing she doesn't use, but I think it's a really solid introduction to enslavement in New England and fighting the dominant narratives about that.

This was okay? It felt really disjointed in parts and sometimes was hard to follow, but I do think this makes a really important intervention in terms of tracing shifts in identity and identity formation, and the individual chapters in the latter half are mostly pretty good (of special interest: the chapter on language and the chapter on Islam among enslaved African-born folks were both really interesting and cool!) Ultimately I didn't love this, but I do think it does important work. (I'm not an African historian, for the record, which I think really impacted my reading of it, because so much of it was so new. Also the 'conclusion' chapter was absolutely WILD.)

So I've read this book twice and fallen in love with it two times at this point. When I first read excerpts of it for a class, a classmate described this book as a gift, and it truly was--reading about Child's grandmother, for example, brought tears to my eyes, especially in her resistance to agency surveillance in her life. So the first two chapters are just incredible gifts to the reader, and it definitely sucked me in on the second read.

The latter chapters are sort of a more traditional historical fare, but Child is so careful in her analysis, so attentive to gender and changes across time in the gendering of labor practices while also avoiding painting everything with a broad brush about that change. It's an incredible book and I strongly recommend it to anyone looking to know more about American Indian labor history, or just anyone looking for a really great, nuanced piece of nonfiction.

A collection of essays drawing from the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project. I'll say upfront this is not your typical local queer history--it's more interested in interrogating questions of process and parts of Twin Cities history that resist dominant narratives in queer history. For that alone, I think it is really incredibly valuable, especially if you are interested in the ways that non-coastal cities posit themselves (or those living in those cities, really,) in the larger narrative of queer history that we tell in the US. Hearing again and again how unimportant Stonewall was to the residents of the Twin Cities at the time, for example, really challenges the dominant narratives about that event's centrality to histories of queer resistance.

There are some pieces that really raised a lot of questions for me--specifically, the roundtable of queers of color made me really reflect on where Two-Spirit queers fit into narratives of queers of color (claiming there are very few people of color in the Twin Cities when, for me, it has the most visible Native population of any place I have ever lived in, which is complicated! And I wished had been addressed by the roundtable, but wasn't) really challenged me to think hard about what my role as a white settler in supporting BIPOC members of my community, especially as someone who is living here.

All of the pieces in this are interesting in their own ways, though it is interesting to see the intellectual well from which each of the authors is collectively drawing (Miranda Joseph's Against the Romance of Community is cited about 800,000 times, which makes sense but is also funny to see.) I'd really recommend this book to anyone interested in a more critical local queer history that isn't afraid to challenge dominant narratives, specifically of progress, in queer history.

[Also, full disclosure, I work with one of the authors, so that may have impacted how I read the book.]

So I first read this book fifteen years ago, and in coming back to it now, I was so afraid it wasn't going to be as good as I remembered, as moving--but holy hell was I wrong. (At the very least, I was wrong for me--I'm not saying this is the best book in the world per se, but any sense of nostalgia that informs this review has stuck with me, rather than fading away.) Caseley's imagery has stuck with me this entire time, from Uncle Max sticking his cigar behind his ear like a roll of Life Savers to Sierra's father being too tall for the gurney, and revisiting it is like a punch in the gut. This book is an incredible look at grief and grieving, and it was a joy and a pleasure to revisit it again after all these years.

This was a really, really fun read! It was an incredible telling of second-wave feminism and the way that space operated in making feminism manifest in people's day-to-day lives. The chapters on softball made me feel especially soft and wonderful, though Enke does an excellent job of making sure the reader knows none of those spaces are utopian or without trouble--they are really careful to trace the ways in which racism, classism, and homophobia played out in these spaces. I really think this book does some incredible things with considering the way that space plays out in feminism, and highlights the way that second-wave feminism played out actively in women's lives. The conclusion especially though was a great read. Enke really digs into the idea that women didn't (and don't!) know what constituted "woman" as a category and that creating woman-only spaces deliberately excludes some women (cis as well as trans.) It's a really good, fast read, and I strongly recommend it!

I was expecting to be totally uninterested in this book- I figured it was just another book about cultural memory around Lincoln, and like, I've read Merrill Peterson and Barry Watson so what more could be said? And admittedly, some sections of this book do read like those books--there were parts that I went "eh, this isn't super duper new information to me, or a new way of analyzing it." But some parts--particularly the opening chapter about Lincoln's body as a political tool, where I was like screaming with excitement--really were new and refreshing to read. The last chapters also were great, as Fox goes over the latest Lincoln-related stuff, and that was super interesting because I consciously remember that time (it sort of ends with Spielberg's Lincoln, which was something of a landmark moment in my life.)

Fox is also very attentive to the differences in memory between white Americans and Black Americans across history, which is awesome! It also made me reflect a lot on the regional differences he doesn't quite touch on--he divides the country between "north" and "south," which makes some sense, but doesn't really get into the "west" which I think is super interesting, and even within those, there's a radically different sense? Like as someone who used to live in the Land of Lincoln and now lives about an hour and a half from Mankato (site of the largest mass execution conducted in the US, where 38 Dakota men were killed on orders from Lincoln himself) there is an entirely different sense about Lincoln there and here. And while that's not necessarily Fox's fault--he acknowledges in his Notes on Sources that he couldn't find the archival material to address other racialized groups in the US--it does leave some interesting gaps.

Nonetheless, I really think this book is valuable, particularly for Fox's body analytic--even if Lincoln/dead white dudes aren't your thing, if you're interested in thinking about embodiment in history, this could be a really really valuable book for you!

So this book was a complicated read for me. Normally I post my reviews of books I read for school before class, because I want to get my thoughts out there before we talk about it, but I genuinely couldn't tell how I felt about this book until after we talked about it, and even then, sorting out my feelings was complicated. At first, I couldn't tell if my reservations about the book had to do with the content of the book, or the way it was written, and ultimately it was a little bit of both, though I think really it was more of the former. I will admit that my feelings were clarified mostly because we got to speak with Ari Kelman in class (over Skype) and he explained some of the ways he went about trying to craft the narrative arc of the book, which hit on some of the roots of my problems with it. Kelman explained that he did his best to give every actor in the book the benefit of the doubt, and to portray them in as fair a light as he possible could, which is very reasonable! Except that at least I as a reader, and many, many others, exist in a culture of white supremacy that tells us that certain kinds of knowledges, epistemologies, ontologies etc. are more valid than others, which means that when it came to the debate about the "actual" site of the Sand Creek massacre, it really felt like the knowledges of white history and archeology carried more weight than those of the descendants. I absolutely know that that was not Kelman's intention, but it leads me to thinking about our role as historians and storytellers in keeping "balance" in our work when dominant narratives are present in and around the stories we tell. In short: I think Kelman needed to use a little more multipartiality in telling this story, and that is my biggest problem with it.

That being said: it's a very carefully (and quite well done) intervention into questions of public memory and the crafting of that memory based on certain types of epistemologies, and I would recommend it to people thinking about those types of questions.

Things this book does well: re-examine the narrative about the "green revolution," and disentangle the ways that development as a practice involving food and populations, uh, well, 'developed.' It really denaturalized the history of that practice and the theories surrounding it, and for that I think it is honestly worth checking out.

Things I struggled with in this book: it feels like it bounces all over the place geographically and to some extent temporally, at least in the latter half of the book? There were some historical figures who I really struggled to keep straight even as they appeared again and again. Also I read the e-book which comes with zero pictures, which is annoying. Also the conclusion struck me as very weird (there's a bit where he was like "PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT FOOD-RELATED DEVELOPMENT ANY MORE BECAUSE OF 24-HOUR NEWS ON TV" and I was like 'that's not what your book is about but ok') and really jolted me out of the book in general. Also it just isn't generally the kind of book I find very interesting in the first place, so that was something that is my fault, not the book's.

All that being said, again, I would actually recommend this book because I think it has some important things to say about the ways that food-related development projects have been run historically (it stupidly had never occurred to me that 'there are starving children in China!' was a phrase more to do with defeating Communism than about actual children...) and I think that is really important in the politics around development today.

Tahmahkera's book was really enjoyable to read--it was rich and accessible while still being theoretically sound. I don't know that it was massively groundbreaking in terms of analysis itself--I've seen Reel Injun, and that film makes very similar if not the same arguments as this book--but seeing it in the realm of sitcoms rather than films was interesting, particularly with the focus on Native humor as a model of survivance. It certainly raised a lot of questions for me in aligning Tahmahkera's readings of sitcom episodes alongside queer of color critique (especially Muñoz's disidentifications) and I think that alone is incredibly generative!