I will admit that I wanted to read this book almost exclusively because of a borderline throwaway line in a National Geographic documentary from the early 90s. And this book wasn't as terrible as the review might make it seem, but it wasn't super great either, to be honest. There were parts where Taylor's writing about enslaved people struck me as like... gross and weird? Which made this book a little difficult, given that it's about an enslaved man. She at one point said that being polite and tactful was "second nature" to Paul Jennings and that really strikes me as terrifyingly close to like undermining the situation in which he lived that made it so he had to learn to do that?

And I guess I'm just confused how a book about an enslaved person like this can exist with writing like that in a post-Orlando Patterson/Saidiya Hartman/so many other people world? I get that it's meant for a popular audience, but I don't think that excuses a lack of really digging into what it meant to be an enslaved person. Taylor does it at times, noting the differences in experiences between those working in the house versus those working in the fields, but there's a lot more that could and honestly should have been done in grappling with that.

That being said, there was some decent information in there about enslavement in Washington, DC, and I do think bringing Jennings's life to the fore is an important project; I just wish it had been done with a little more care and reference to the larger historiography and theorization that's out there.

I have a LOT of complicated feelings about this book.

It was marketed to me as an LGBT read which, uh... I guess? Yes, there are a couple confirmed gay characters in it, and there are gay characters with AIDS in it, and AIDS is a major plot point in the book. And like everything else in the universe about AIDS, it made me cry. But it also felt like the use of it as this backdrop piece really created this slippage where it could be used. I did appreciate that the author didn't try to ascribe any 'meaning' to it, though it would be interesting to do a reading of the character of Toby alongside, say, critiques of how PWA were depicted during the mid to late 80s, but it also was left in this amorphous, apolitical space. At one point, June, the narrator, hears Reagan's speech where he breaks the silence on AIDS with the suggestion that people should stop having sex to prevent it, and she literally says something like "I think that's a good idea." And yes, I think we're supposed to attribute that response to her immaturity and her mixed-up feelings about love and romance, but it also gave me this moment of horror because her response went entirely unquestioned. That I find really terrifying, because in my experience, there's a massive memory gap in HIV/AIDS history in people around my age and younger, and I don't need the ~discourse crew~ to get any ideas. And I think the way that sex was just avoided is part of it as well--Toby and Finn (the two gay characters) are painted as these incredibly asexual, borderline saint-like figures who can do nothing wrong. They're probably meant to contrast with the other characters' messy 'regular' lives but it just felt... off and weird to me? It felt icky, I guess is the moral of the story, and I was uncomfortable with it throughout the book. I get that like not everyone was in ACT UP, but there was something about the shift of the pain of dying of AIDS was handed off to the family just rubbed me the wrong way.

All of that being said, this book was incredibly beautifully written, and I had to read the last ~third of the book pretty fast because I had to know what was going to happen to these characters. It's probably a really good book if you, unlike me, have Some Chill, but the things that bugged me bugged me throughout.

This book was a great look at the complications of stereotypes surrounding chicken and Black women, and really resting in those complications and resisting easy answers. It was very tenderly done, and I really appreciated the care with which Williams-Forson handled the various issues at play: not just the stereotypes and answering them, but also the lived experiences of Black women regarding their relationships to women. For that careful handling, I really recommend this book, even if the subject isn't one that you might immediately think would be interesting.

OH MY GOD. I know I'm about 12,000 years late on this, but this book is incredible--so beautifully poetic even as it grapples with serious political issues. I honestly don't have enough synonyms for beautiful to describe it, honestly. By the end, I was very anxious about the characters and had trouble putting the book down. This might be the best book I've read this year so far.

I want to say: I understand in part why the things I'm about to say I didn't like about this book are Things. I also want to say that this could be a pretty damn useful teaching tool if taught in excerpts? But I wouldn't recommend reading the entire thing without planning to read some follow-up books--of which she wonderfully lists in the back, so you have a lot to go off of!

So, my little baby complaint is that this book is meant for a popular audience and uses settler colonialism as its primary framework, which is totally cool! More people should know about settler colonialism! But she never defines it, and while theoretically her examples show it, my second complaint comes into play with this: almost all of her examples of settler colonialism involve militaristic action (either with an actual military/militia, or an unorganized body of white folks just killing people.) This runs the risk of making other parts of settler colonialism, especially assimilation attempts (allotment, boarding schools, termination, etc.), seem somehow less damaging and harmful. 'Can't we hold both as terrible?' Yes we can and should, but given the amount of space in the text that she gives to the former and not the latter speaks to the possibility that the reader will miss the damage of the latter.

My final overarching complaint is that this book is incredibly, dangerously caught up in pain and death. And I know that we need to make that pain legible to white settler folks, but I also think that she leaves very, very little room for stories of resilience and survivance (despite her citation of Vizenor,) and I think that people (white settlers and indigenous folk) need to see stories of survivance to understand what to do next. This is influenced by a lot of personal stuff, but I really do think that those narratives need to carry as much weight as the death and pain because focusing on death and pain only perpetuates the dehumanization of indigenous folks.

BUT: I will say I think it's a decently accessible book for getting people to think settler colonialism and begin to change the paradigms of the dominant narratives about the US state. I just think that when you finish it, you should immediately read one of the books she suggests to get a taste of narratives of resilience and survivance.

I would say this lives up to the hype. It's an incredible read, really tightly woven, and incredibly haunting at parts. It does show its age in parts, especially regarding the mother character who smacks so hard of a feminist from a Certain Era, but for me that was more cozy and comforting than it was truly distracting.

I'm interested to see how certain things are handled in the adaptation, particularly race, because Atwood kind of brushes the chance for characters of color under the rug in the epilogue/post-script thing. It did feel pretty white at times, which, as a white person, wasn't necessarily uncomfortable but might be iffy if you're looking to see yourself represented.

Overall though, I was really kept interested throughout the book, and I'm really glad I finally made the time to sit down and read it!

So this was... basic, and okay I guess? It's wholly unsurprising to me that she's been revealed (through her own words) as being trans-exclusionary, given how invested she seems to be in biological essentialism throughout the book. It's kind of inspired me to try to see if there's like a very basic syllabus of some kinds about what to have folks read after this to expand their understandings of feminism (maybe that's just black feminist theory...)

On the other hand, it did let me mix up the phrase "bottom power" so I kept reading "power bottom," which is always good for a laugh. Otherwise... meh. It was fine.

An incredibly engrossing, quick read--although it's ~300 pages, I finished it in less than a day. Highlights for me included the chapter on butch-femme touch and trauma, and the oral histories of lesbian AIDS activists. Cvetkovich does an incredible broad sweep of a number of lesbian public cultures and readings of things that are really valuable for establishing a framework of how trauma studies might interact with other fields to be truly interdisciplinary. For a book with a somewhat imposing title, I will say this was incredibly accessible, and again- I just couldn't put it down. Looking forward to thinking more about it, and finding ways to think about its framework as related to my own work.

Very good, compelling read that really makes clear how settler colonialism functions on both a structural and individual level (though the analysis obviously works more on a structural level--I do think it can be applied to individual white settler folks, and to bring home how they/we can continue to be complicit in settler colonialism.)

Some of the essays sort of repeat themselves, and her use of Foucault left me completely baffled (and why is she using biopower and not necropolitics!!!!) but I am a pendant who should be ignored. I will also say that her explanation of Australian history is almost non-existent, which may be intentional but does make following the court cases that she frequently cites hard to do, and is an interesting choice given she's published this with a US press. But her framework is really powerful and I think very important in thinking about settler colonialism in the future. Def recommended!

An interesting introduction to thinking about enslavement of American Indian people from the beginnings of colonization. Reséndez traces not only explicit enslavement, but also the ways in which enslavers (particularly Spanish enslavers) managed to keep systems of enslavement in place even when laws dictated they should fall apart. Through this analysis, Reséndez makes the systems of enslavement that still exist more legible as such.

His analysis does fail entirely to go into the ways that sexual violence was a major part of this--he makes clear that women were more highly valued on slave markets, but just erases the reasons for that, which mirrors the continual erasure of the amount of sexual violence that Native women experience to this day. This massive gap in his analysis really needs to be addressed, and the fact that it is not in this book is really a problem.

Nevertheless, undoubtedly this book will open doors for more historians to examine this phenomenon, and to begin to make connections intellectually between American Indian enslavement and African enslavement on the North American continent, making both avenues of thought more productive.