Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello

By

Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis

My Monticello
By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49
NYT

In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” [Read more…]

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

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Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48
NYRB

Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath you. Now imagine lying in a field, or on the forest floor. The same applies, though we rarely think of it: the dirt beneath you, whether a mile or a foot deep, is teeming with more organisms than researchers can quantify. Their best guess is that there are as many as one billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil. Plant roots plunge and swerve like superhighways with an infinite number of on-ramps. And everywhere there are probing fungi. [Read more…]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

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Reviewed by Mike Jay

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
by Dr. Carl L. Hart
Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94
NYRB

The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only around 1900 that it developed a more specialized meaning, uniting what had previously been a disparate group of pharmaceutical products, chemicals used in medical research, and herbal intoxicants. Initially, this new usage of “drugs” referred to toxic and addictive substances that were to be taken only under the direction of a physician. Once the trade in these substances was criminalized in the early twentieth century, the word connoted illegality. [Read more…]

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

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An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.” 

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
by Rafia Zakaria
W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95

There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is perfunctory, form-filling, intended to silence and appease; the latter requires the dissolution of underlying structures and hierarchies for a complete reformulation. Whether it is the National Organization of Women or an organization like Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) or even the Women’s March, all require transformational change. This means reconsidering everything, from the way meetings are organized and conference calls are set up to the way public demonstrations are organized. The go-to for most organizations, sadly, is affirmative change: the installation of a Black woman at the top or the creation of a committee to look into “diversity” (AIUSA convened many of these, fostering the impression that something was being done, when all that was done was to establish another committee whose findings would not be available for months and sometimes years). [Read more…]

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

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at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn

by Robin Scher

“The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an objective reality, a place that lies beyond our subjective perceptions and experiences of the world. The paths toward reaching this destination take many forms, encompassing spiritual practices, creative expression and psychonautical exploration. And while the combination of these pursuits was once the remit of counterculture, today they could not be more interconnected and mainstream. To know why is interesting unto itself, but let’s look beyond that to the more curious nature of this recurring curiosity. [Read more…]

Howls of Grief for the Life Bleeding Out: Harrow, by Joy Williams

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Reviewed by Justin Taylor

Harrow: A Novel
by Joy Williams
Knopf, 224pp., $22.99
Bookforum

I drove across the Everglades in May. I had originally planned to take Alligator Alley, but someone tipped me off that, in the twenty years since I left South Florida, the historically wild and lonesome stretch of road had been fully incorporated into I-75, turned into a standard highway corridor with tall concrete walls on both sides, designed to keep the traffic noise in and the alligators out. So on the drive west from Boynton Beach, I took the northern route, skirting along the bottom of Lake Okeechobee through new subdivisions and past a succession of sugar plantations, the horizon pillared with smoke from the farmers burning cane. Small towns where the only signs of life are dollar stores. Roadside billboards sponsored by the US Sugar Corporation insist that “the air out here is cleaner than congested urban areas.” [Read more…]

Feral States: The US Drifts Into the Pernicious Wilds

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The United States’ democracy is being threatened by increasingly polarized politics.
Other countries’ histories offer warnings and suggest possible solutions.

by Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press
From a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The rise of political polarization in the United States has pushed analysts to ask a fundamental question: what long-term effects will polarized politics have on the United States’ democracy?1 Existing evidence provides ample reason for concern. At the elite level, deep political divides in Washington have crippled efforts at legislative compromise, eroded institutional and behavioral norms, and incentivized politicians to pursue their aims outside of gridlocked institutions, including through the courts. Yet these divides extend far beyond the corridors of power, as polarization at the mass level is pushing Americans across the country to divide themselves into distinct and mutually exclusive political camps. The rise of an “us versus them” mindset and political identity in American sociopolitical life is evident in everything from the rise of highly partisan media to the decline in Americans’ willingness to marry someone from the opposing political party.2 Even more concerningly, these dynamics are contributing directly to a steep rise in political violence.3 Polarization has already brought on serious problems—what more lies ahead? Are insights on this critical question available from the experience of other polarized democracies? [Read more…]

‘Aliveness Made True of Blackness’ in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water

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Reviewed by Yagnishsing Dawoor

Open Water
by Caleb Azumah Nelson 
Grove Atlantic, 160pp., $12.10
ORB

The killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers quickly spawned a soundscape dominated by grief, despair and anger. Song after song released by Black musicians all over the world thematised antiblack violence, indexing Blackness to death. “Black Parade,” Beyoncé’s joyous love letter to Black culture, stands out as an exception to this trend. Dropped on Juneteenth, the song came with a message addressed to Beyoncé’s Black fans that privileged not the terms of death, but of being alive. ‘Being Black is your activism,’ the singer wrote on her website, ‘Black excellence is a form of protest. Black joy is your right’. [Read more…]

Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation

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by Antoinette LaFarge

Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation
DoppelHouse Press, 432pp., $49.95

Introduction [excerpt]

It matters what stories we tell to tell other
 stories with.… It matters what stories
make worlds, what worlds make stories.
—Donna Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative
Fabulation, String Figures, So Far”

It sometimes seems that we live in an era of ubiquitous fakery. Indeed, there is now an entire vocabulary to encompass shades of deception that leave the propaganda and disinformation of past generations in the dust. Now we live with fake memoirs and deepfake videos, catfishing and sockpuppetry on social networks, astroturfing (fake grassroots efforts), and an entire rainbow of washings: whitewashing, greenwashing, purple, red, pink. In the realm of film and video alone we find docufiction, docudrama, pseudo-documentary, fake-fiction, mockumentary, and reality-TV parsing out differences in the compounding of truth and fiction that sometimes seem almost too subtle to grasp. Accompanying this shift from the early information age to our current “infocalypse” era of rampant misinformation, a form of art has emerged that likewise traffics in deception, placing itself right at this potent junction where fiction and fact make contact. But instead of following the current pressure to choose sides—especially, to choose the moral high ground of fact and truth as a bulwark against a tide of “lying liars”—there is a group of artists who take a different path, one that confounds fact and fiction in complicated ways. One that indeed celebrates a state in which the two cannot be simply or securely separated into opposing camps. [Read more…]

Radical Black Dignity and the Shared Revolutionary Paths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Reviewed by Brandon M. Terry

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Books, 384 pp., $18.99
NYRB

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the struggle for racial justice of any contretemps since the one between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. [Read more…]

Aidan Salakhova’s The Dust Became The Breath

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at Gazelli Art House, London (through 6 June 2021)
Reviewed by Niccy Hallifax

Walking into a London gallery again after a year of restrictions and lock-downs was strange but uplifting for the soul. More uplifting still was seeing an artist I have long admired, ever since I saw her work at the Saatchi gallery many years before. The Dust Became The Breath, at Gazelli Art House, is a solo exhibition for Aidan Salakhova, the prominent Azeri artist. [Read more…]

Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020

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by Mark Goodman

For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read more…]

Portals for Memory, and Wonder, in the Work of Reggie Burrows Hodges

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at Karma Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Hilton Als
NYRB

Reggie Burrows Hodges begins by painting a raw canvas black. Then he paints his figures and their atmosphere on top of that. His hand is everywhere in his work, in control but not controlling. Shall we call Hodges’s work controlled bleeding? While Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like managed their paint by splashing color here and there, their project was different from Hodges’s in a number of ways, including their use of color. While today we look on those distinguished Color Field paintings for the joy they express about physicality, the irrepressible eye, and a relative lack of fear when it comes to the decorative, there are, in these artists’ wonderfully gestural work, some shortcomings. Such as their use, or lack of use, of the color black, a hue that is of the utmost importance to Hodges, who has said: “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space….If you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at the depth.” [Read more…]

It Floods the Womb Until One Drowns

By

Reviewed Brandon M. Terry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $27.52
NYRB

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. [Read more…]