The Management of Savagery / Max Blumenthal / 2019

I picked up this book looking to better understand the history of US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as reactionary and perhaps revolutionary violent resistance against it. In order to contextualize Afghanistan, Blumenthal begins in the Cold War, when the US began arming tribal Islamists, including Al-Qaeda, who were frequently compared to US independence heroes and Star Wars rebels by interventionists. In particular, Blumenthal does a great job disentangling the ways the military industrial complex manipulates the media to sanitize allies, demonize targets, and muddy an admittedly complex terrain to audiences to justify intervention and pull Washington’s purse strings. Inevitably, Blumenthal ends up playing defense for the Assad regime in Syria, pointing out untrue propaganda against his regime, a move his critics see as apologetic but I see as simply nuanced. Blumenthal can be seen as a tankie by some, and that’s probably inevitable for a writer who spends so much time countering hyperbolic US propaganda against its enemy nations, who are of course as flawed and complex as any other nation. I particularly appreciated Blumenthal’s writing on the rise of Alex Jones, who had an early career as a 9/11 truther through documentaries like Loose Change, which I had watched as a middle schooler. I never connected the dots from Loose Change to the Sandy Hook massacre denialism to the rise of Trump. Blumenthal includes a skillful argument about how neocon and neolib US military interventions led to the rise of Trump by destabilizing once functional countries and increasing the amount of terrorism and refugees in Europe. This increase led to a rise in ultranationalism and xenophobia the far right thrives on. As someone who was too young during the 9/11 era and didn’t pay enough attention to the interventionist wars during the Obama era, Blumenthal provided an incisive and clarifying narration of the history I lived.  4/5 

The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latino/a Social Justice, Theology, and Identity / Robert Chao Romero / 2020

The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latino/a Social Justice, Theology, and Identity / Robert Chao Romero / 2020

I was recommended this book by one of my besties, and in general, there’s a part of me that does miss the clarity of a holy sense of purpose in the world in the religious sense, so I entered the book an eager participant, but was somewhat quickly and maybe rather unsurprisingly spat out. Romero is attempting to straddle several different audiences: ethnic studies peeps, theology peeps, homies in the pews, and other Christians at large. If you are a white Christian or a person of color assimilated into the white Christian experience looking to understand the Latino Christian experience, this is an excellent book for you. Hopefully, you’ll love it and consider it a 4 to 5/5. If you are on the dangerous path of thinking Ted Cruz makes a lot of sense, hopefully this book can pull you back into a more Christlike path. That’s because what the book does most excellently and the thing that truly makes it worthwhile is the genealogy it carves out for the Latin American/Latinx churchgoer. Romero traces the social justice legacy of the Latinx church going as far back as Bartolomé de las Casas through Sor Juana to Santo Romero and the sanctuary movement. Gathering the stories of these Latin American Christians and articulating their shared legacy and inspiring contributions is necessary work in the canon building of our history. Here, Romero does an excellent job also holding these saints to task for their missteps. He mentions De Las Casas anti-Black mistakes, for example. In a similar move, he doesn’t sugarcoat the tragedy of Sor Juana’s last years and death, where she repudiated her past feminism and died silenced and shamed into submission by the Catholic church, erased by history until her work was rediscovered in the 1950s by feminists. While Romero is invested in weaving a narrative meant to inspire not just cultural interest, but also Christian conversion, you can feel him strain against these messier moments. For me at least, these messier moments reveal so much more about the people and Christianity’s institutions. Is Sor Juana’s story an inspiring story about a woman’s bravery fighting against patriarchy in Christianity? Or is it a crushing tale about the feminist freedom that is yet to be possible and perhaps literally impossible within the Catholic church and similar structures?

If you are like me-- interested but already damaged by and thereby suspicious of religion--you will likely be disappointed. One of the most baffling and egregious missteps where Romero truly lets down all of his audiences comes from his omission of syncretism. Syncretism is “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.” Syncretism is a crucial part of the story of Latin American Christianity-- for both Black and Native people-and Romero just doesn’t bother even mentioning it. I’m left to conjecture here, but I believe he does this 1) because he doesn’t want Latin American Christianity to seem “less” Christian than Western Christianity and 2) because he’s a bit anti-indigenous and antiblack. This misstep is gigantic because it’s just common knowledge in ethnic studies and becomes emblematic of his other missteps, such as when he fails to talk about the indigenous history behind Juan Diego and La Virgin de Guadalupe and in effect erases Chichimeca deity Tonantzin. A more honest engagement with non-Christian folk traditions and the cosmovision of Mexico Profundo (again another common knowledge text in ethnic studies) would have been so much more interesting and fruitful for understanding the so-called brown church. Romero buys into the outdated conception of mestizaje, referring to himself as la raza cosmica in the book and literally detailing his DNA results in a move that flattens identity and belonging to mere blood. Although he acknowledges the anti-Black history of the mestizaje elsewhere, Romero fails to rigorously conceptualize race throughout the project. Romero tries (in maybe two pages) to theorize a “brown” identity somehow uniting all Latinos with Natives, Arabs, Asians, presumably some Black folks, and even Eastern Europeans. The sheer arrogance and carelessness of this move is stunning. By the end of the book, the word “brown” is still rather empty of significant meaning and seems mostly there to portray a false unity between disparate people with different relationships to Christianity and their own non-whiteness. My global south peers, especially in South Asia, take issue with being asked to identify themselves against whiteness when their shades of brown aren't conspicuous where they're from. They don't think about themselves against a white backdrop the way Latinos do. Romero proclaims this book to be about “the global Brown Church” then leaves out rich Black, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and Asian Christian thought. It is stunningly slipshod for a so called academic text.

While I can appreciate framing Jesus as a brown man from the hood, his constant mapping of Galilee onto LA has strong disconnected youth pastor vibes. He might as well had sat with his baseball cap backwards and talked about how Lin-Manuel Miranda is his favorite rapper. If he could keep this attempt at inclusivity consistent, I might not have faulted him on it, but he calls the Virgin Mary a single mother, something which is both factually incorrect and a slap in the face of Joseph and other adoptive parents. He uses ableist metaphors unbecoming of an ethnic studies scholar. And worst of all, he fails to ever explicitly mention LGBTQ+ communities. This last omission especially practically guarantees the failure of his project because homophobia is a major reason young people abandon religion. For me, this book was a ⅖ at best. I'm still waiting on the day for Christians to forsake the colonizer logic behind their missionary work and be more Christlike.

Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of the Salvadoran Civil War / Joaquín M. Chavez / 2017

Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of the Salvadoran Civil War / Joaquín M. Chavez / 2017

This book is everything I wanted and more. It unbraids the tangle of historical movements fighting for justice in El Salvador during its revolutionary era, providing clarity where led savvy and untrained political thinkers only see chaos. It draws out the history of university militants, liberation theologians and their flocks, campesino organizers, and more in their respective and crossing paths for change, be it through electoral politics, armed resistance, or otherwise. The conversations and tensions between these groups is illuminating, especially since most history paints the Salvadoran conflict as a Cold War battle with US and Israel supporting the dictatorship and Cuba and Russia supporting the FMLN. The recovery of the different ideologies at play in the resistance is key to a deeper understanding of how we got to where we are now and how we can try to do better. It was illuminating for example to learn of Che Guevara's dismissal of revolutionary possibility in El Salvador, in part because the country lacks enough mountains for guerillas to retreat in, and how leftist militias built broader based coalitions to sustain the revolution, adapting Vietnamese and Maoist strategies. It was illuminating to learn of the debates surrounding Roque Dalton's death, where militarized and dogmatic rooted peasant revolutionaries bristled against the influence of cosmopolitan petit bourgeoisie they felt was attempting to hijack the revolution because they did not want a Cuban and Soviet revolution, but a Salvadoran one. This book holds the pain, paranoia, and horrors of people who literally sacrificed everything in an attempt to forge a brighter future for El Salvador. I'm immensely grateful to Chavez for his work. Alongside Unforgetting by Lovato, this book is key to understanding El Salvador and especially illuminated my understanding of the political forces at play. There's plenty of people and areas of research I will continue to research where Chavez has pointed me. 5/5

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.

That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.

When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.

When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.

As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.

I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.

In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.

I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.

On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.

I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.