MelFlashman

emilybooks:

by Marisa Meltzer

That first line of “The Last Unmarried Person in America”—“The great marriage boom of ’84 began shortly after Congress passed the historic National Family Security Act”—is such good science fiction that it took me several beats to realize it was in fact made up. Then Ellen Willis expands on it, noting that the Act abolishes divorce, prosecutes single people as vagrants, requires applicants for civil service jobs to sign a monogamy oath, and my personal favorite, makes the interstate sale of quiche a federal offense.

This America has finally made “a reality of what had then been an impossible dream: universal marriage.” Gays who take an oath for a sexless marriage can marry, and young couples insist that their marriage has nothing to do with the NFSA but is instead about their love; they assure the narrator that their desire to commit is spontaneous. They tell the story of the cute proposal: the guy told his wife-to-be that she could stop sewing scarlet S’s on her clothes and start sewing buttons onto her husband’s shirts.

Willis wrote this in 1981, a time I think of as not particularly marriage-friendly, mostly due to the fact that my own parents, along with seemingly ever other Baby Boomer couple in California that was part of my grammar school orbit, divorced in the early ‘80s.

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lareviewofbooks:

Part I of a series of pieces responding to
Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature?
(Harvard University Press, 2011)

Today, essays by
Walter Benn Michaels, Erica Edwards, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen.

Phillis Wheatley by Scipio Moorhead (c. 1773)
CLASS Walter Benn Michaels
One way of understanding Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? is as a book about literary history, about a period, now over, in which writing by black people was oriented toward a response to the conditions of Jim Crow. In an exchange between Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Warren himself suggests this approach when he says that he could have called it What Was Negro Literature? To which Gates replies “The end of Negro Literature? I like that.” But for precisely the reason that Gates wishes he had, Warren didn’t call it What Was Negro Literature? Negro literature — the negro himself — is comfortably a thing of the past: Gates and Warren are professors of African American not Negro Studies; there are hundreds of universities and colleges that grant degrees in Black or African American studies, but not one that grants a degree in Negro studies. Warren’s point in insisting on “African American” is to insist that, even while eagerly putting the Negro behind it, African American literature has just as eagerly hung on to the legacy of Jim Crow, has mistakenly continued to understand racial disparity as the lynchpin of American inequality and thus, to put all his cards on the table, has become a force that works against rather than for the equality it imagines itself to seek. (And to put all mine on the table, Warren, Adolph Reed and I are working together on a book, You Can’t Get There From Here, about neoliberalism and the current politics of race.)

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)