The Hacienda is a deliciously haunting novel that slithers into your mind and keeps you dreaming of it. Still, his amplification of debates about power and politics within a broader context of class and colonial struggle is an important public intervention and a rebuke to the parochialism of corporate media debates about identity. But other fields like cultural studies have long made these kinds of critiques about the limits of representationalism.Īnd some of the specificity and power of the original essay is lost in the translation and expansion the historical jumps - from examples of decolonial struggles to the material realities of big tech - can be jarring, and makes it hard to really see what the historical examples can teach us in the current context. The argument that transforming the world that creates the powerful rooms and being accountable to those not in the room are more important ethical imperatives than neoliberal multiculturalism is important.
Throughout the five chapters, Táíwò provides critiques of liberal democracy and institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and considers thinkers ranging from Frantz Fanon to Paulo Freire. The book traverses some of the history (and co-optation) of the very term “identity politics” from the Combahee River Collective and features compelling mini-histories of cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarity in independence movements. While elite capture usually refers to the corrupt way elites use public funds meant as public resources for themselves, he extends it as a metaphor to argue against the limitations of a politics that focuses on getting marginalized people to enter powerful rooms. And his essay about the limitations of standpoint epistemology - taken as something of a left critique of the lack of attention to class in identity politics more broadly - sparked the kind of buzz that has now led to his compact new book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Táíwò’s 2020 academic essay “ Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference” got much more social media traction than the usual journal treatise.Īs the post-Bernie left has struggled to create cross-racial, cross-class solidarity, critiques of the limited corporate nature of identity politics have also arisen. Georgetown philosophy professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Rachel StrolleĮlite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics As Put tries to put the pieces of their family history together in the midst of heartbreak, she'll confront the idea of life debt and inherited trauma along with love and duty. Their relationship fractures when Put announces her upcoming marriage, to a woman, at the age of 40. But achievement and expectation do not inhabit the same house, especially when Put comes out in her 20s. For many years, Put tried to repay in kind, making choices that would befit a good Cambodian daughter while building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. Put's life was then saved by the American military nurses and doctors that Ma had rushed her into the arms of, a story which, repeated constantly over the years, became family legend. Putsasa Reang's family fled Cambodia when she was just 11 months old, spending nearly three weeks aboard an overcrowded navy vessel before making it to an American naval base in the Philippines. Dahlia AdlerĪ searing memoir that seeks to discover the generational cost of the expectations placed on children by those that sacrifice for them, Ma and Me is a stirring journey through a mother and daughter's relationship. But you wait, because you know some day she'll warm up, just a little bit, and it'll be wondrous to see.
Diving into Mallory's mind feels like simultaneously wishing you could hug a friend while fearing you'll crack her brittle bones if you do, and the choice isn't yours anyway because she has no desire to be touched by you. As she carries the weight and memory of their affair through both her past and future, Mallory has to reckon with the ways the affair continues to haunt her, and who she is and can be if she leaves it behind her for good. Through the unnamed woman, who also happens to be a picture book author, artistic Mallory finds not just sex and sophistication, but, in her mind, a mentor. Grief, lust, and growing up coalesce in this quietly compelling novel about a college freshman named Mallory who copes with her mother's death and her burgeoning sexuality by having an affair with an older woman who happens to be a married professor.