aimiller's Reviews (689)

Just a really solid work with a strong but still interesting and super useful framework; the citation you'll see of this really speaks to how useful it is. It's deeply thorough, and might strike some folks as repetitive, but I think O'Brien really just does an amazing job of showing how deeply pervasive these practices are, and really challenge the reader to consider how these practices might be used in their own local histories. Strongly recommend for everyone but especially people who live/have lived in the area currently known as New England, as a way to reconsider the spaces they occupy.

I will say right off the bat that I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the press for the opportunity to read this book.

This collection was overall pretty delightful and interesting! I was not super familiar with Baba Yaga as a concept or figure, but I would say you don't have to be. There is also an opportunity for some of the stories to feel repetitive, but I think the stories did a good job of being varied enough that they weren't the same thing over and over again. The story that got me the most was "The Partisan and the Witch" by Charlotte Honigman--it was just beautiful and brutal at the same time. I also liked "Teeth" quite a bite as well.

I would say that ultimately this is closer to a 3.5 stars, and that my rating is heavily informed by the fact that I read this in 30 minute bursts over the course of a number of weeks. I will say Barr is extremely thorough and so attentive to differences between the different nations and groups she talks about; she doesn't generalize, and she really digs in deeply to the relationships that the Spanish had with each group. Sometimes it kind of all melded together and I wasn't sure what was happening any more, but it felt consistent enough that I understood the general arc of her argument fairly well. Would love to revisit this in a classroom or other group setting!

This book does a really solid job of narrating how the issues surrounding reproductive politics (from child care cost problems to gay marriage to welfare) are not the fault of feminists, but racist neoliberal policies aimed at destroying the social safety net. It's very methodical in breaking that down, and drawing it all together under the umbrella of reproduction. I wouldn't say it was the most groundbreaking work I've read? I guess I found the title a little misleading; for me, everything she touched was fairly obviously in the realm of the reproductive and I was interested in stretching that and seeing how it works.

That being said, this is very accessible and could definitely be useful for undergrads; it's mostly well-thought out (there's a bit at the beginning about trans studies that seems slippery at best, but it's easy to ignore for the most part) and she takes care to address racial disparities particularly among Black women and Latina women. (She also includes Native women but it feels kind of more as an add-on in many cases.)

This book was... fine? I'm not super into colonial histories of Anglo America in the first place (I think they're boring) and this didn't feel like. Groundbreaking, though I guess if you're looking for like. Some archival narration that aligns with things already said about fashion re: homespun movements and anti-importation. That is perhaps unfair of me, but the book as a whole just didn't click with me on any level. If you LIKE these kinds of books, though, you will probably like it a lot!

Definitely a solid look at the works of some indigenous women and their writing! I was really interested in the chapter about Silko (maybe largely in part because it's the only work I have specifically looked at) but also was the most explicit maybe in using Goeman's framework, as the connections between literal maps and narrative and almanac all came together. The chapter about movement between the spaces of the city and the reservation was also really solid and I think could be useful in teaching.

This book is just so good; Lowery does an incredible job of tracing the Lumbee attempts at recognized nationhood while also holding space for all the differences in opinion in the community and a collective understanding that holds the community together. The nuance she's able to use here is just incredible, and a great model for so many others on how to pay such careful attention to so many factors within the community, and explore them while holding the tension of insider vs outsider recognition in a community (and seeing that those are not necessarily binary, but connected and separate at the same time.) Really encourage folks to read this if they want to think about the processes of Native recognition on a federal and state level, as well as understand community as a complex matter with a number of levels.

First off, I will say I received a copy of this book through the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing, and I'm grateful to the publishers for the opportunity to read this.

I think this book is well-meaning but in some ways it Tries Way Too Hard--like obviously Azza comes from a good place, but sometimes she reads as like. Stupid, rather than out of her depth culturally. The plot about the college seems far-fetched at best, and while the work is clearly of the present, its lack of historical ties make some of the points seem loose and disconnected. (The references to the Muslim ban, for example, disconnected from the actual context of the current administration's Islamophobic policies, fall kind of short.) Azza's PTSD is also never really put into context for us, nor named as such. And

boy was I not convinced by a college junior falling in love with a high school senior--the maturity gap there is enormous.

It's not a bad book, it just tried to tackle too much without enough attention to each piece. There are kids maybe who might find this book interesting, but mostly I found it lacking.

So this is a solid and slim little volume that examines the moment between emancipation (in its many forms, not limited solely to the Emancipation Proclamation) and Reconstruction when freedmen were given land. Franke's historical work here is solid, and her analysis about how reparations might be made in the present is really interesting and worth chewing on. The language is mostly accessible, and I think this could be used really effectively in a college or even high school classroom--her invocations of Agamben, for example, are more nods than any serious theoretical work, though it is there for you if you are familiar with Agamben.

The struggle I had with this book ultimately was the struggle I have with a lot of writing about reparations in the form of land distribution, which is the question of whose land is being distributed, and what we have learned from the state distributing land and to whom. Though Franke does discuss, very briefly, the Dawes Act and the ways that land distribution has been used to undermine indigenous sovereignty, she does not spend any time thinking about the fact that it is still land belonging to indigenous people that would be distributed--which I get, because it's hugely complicated and messy. I genuinely think analyzing the case of freedmen who had been enslaved by nations of the five southeastern tribes--some of whom were promised land in the 1866 treaty, which ended enslavement in those nations--could have really built up her analysis. What happens when the land being distributed doesn't belong, in the eyes of the state, to white men? And how can we learn from the Dawes Act that the distribution of private property on the part of the state is always a move to make those involved conform to specific modes of citizenship, which are heavily gendered as well as raced? (She doesn't seem to touch on this even with the idea that single women could not own land under the Sherman distribution rules, which, given that she's written a book about marriage, seems odd to me.)

I do find her discussions of collective ownership in the present and how to get that land back into Black communities very compelling--she doesn't fully address the problem of capitalism and its relationship to property, but she seems to hint at it, and it gets its fullest address here. Overall I do think this book is a solid conversation starter engaged with other pieces talking about reparations, and many of my complaints are complaints I have about that conversation more broadly. I can definitely imagine incorporating this book into a syllabus, and also could be really useful for book clubs!

This is just like a really incredible anthology--so many of the authors are so conscious of the world in which they're writing and living, and so resistant to the narratives of survivorship, and what that specifically means in this moment (2019, during #MeToo, etc.)

So many of these essays are so good; I think my favorite is Gwen Benaway's essay, "Silence," but also Amber Dawn's "This (Traumatized, Kinky, Queer) Body Holds a Story," and "The Mother You Need" by Elisabeth de Mariaffi. By "good," of course I mean moved me in ways that shift beyond the kind of sympathetic pornotroping of a lot of representations of survivor narratives (not all; this text obviously owes a lot to the work of Dorothy Allison and others, and some essayists acknowledge that,) and pushed me intellectually and emotionally to think about what survival and living after sexual assault means.