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Index CardsIn these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm,
In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
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4.5 ★★★★★
Based on 11 reviews
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★★★★★ 4
Disturbing Questions
"Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation." writes Edmund S. Morgan in 1975, and ends this book with the rhetorical question: "Is America still colonial Virginia writ large?"
These are deeply disturbing questions - questions one is compelled to ponder as one reads this lucid and dispassionate presentation of the how primitive accumulation in Virginia at the beginning of the 17th century was replaced a century later by an orderly and opulent society based on slavery. The answer to such questions is not made easy by the realisation that the only other successful republican experiment - the Athenian democracy - blossomed too on a bed of slavery.
Do these questions matter today? Have we not moved on from racism? I'm afraid not. Again the voice of Morgan: "In the republican way of thinking, zeal for liberty and equality could go hand in hand with contempt for the poor and plans for enslaving them." Sounds eerily familiar? Just as today's language used to describe terrorist threats is redolent of the rhetoric that once surrounded the lynching of black bodies. Racism (albeit globalised) is re-visiting the land today, and so are republican virtues and values.
The book is long, and in some ways, too detailed. Morgan delights in the telling particular, and at times one wishes he would not linger on some specifics. But this has a purpose. He wants to show the imperceptible and surreptitious mechanisms by which a society acquires its ugly and immoral traits until they become so natural as to be invisible. Step by step, event by event, law by law a construction emerges that would have horrified its founders. Yet, at the time, it seamed the logical, and the right thing to do.
A strong point in Morgan's narrative is the links he highlights between the developments in Virginia and the Britain's commercial interests, migration policies, population growth and control, state revenue, and political history or thought. One can better appreciate the import of Virginia for Britain and the mother country's fixation and fascination for the North American colonies.
Brash and brutal, Virginian slavery stood openly as godmother at the foundation of the American Republic. Other aspects of slavery also contributed significantly - but as they were indirect, they remained veiled and are hardly recognised even today. New England benefited greatly from its cod trade to the Caribbean, where the product that was found to be unfit for European markets was fed to the slaves, thus freeing up land that otherwise would have been used to sustain them. When will we get a total picture of slavery's import for America's economic foundations?
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Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2003
★★★★★ 5
how a country could develop a "national character" founded on the love of liberty while simultaneously importing thousands and t
Format: Paperback
This book lays out hte paradox, how a country could develop a "national character" founded on the love of liberty while simultaneously importing thousands and thousands of bondsmen to provided the "free people" with the necessities of life: i.e., why slavery was necessary to support the kind of freedom the white folk wanted to become accustomed to.... and implicitly, why the industrial revolution finally changed the hearts and minds of enough Americans to make slavery seem unnecessary and therefore, if was no longer a necessary evil, why it had to be overthrown.
Morgan writes objectively -- but his feelings are always detectable through his writing style, which is perhaps the best academic English to be found anywhere. I found it gripping. The book was published in 1972, and has doubtless been corrected by many subsequent researchers in some of its particulars -- but it was the fountainhead for a new way of understanding American history that young people all have learned about in high school, but which many baby-boomers have never seriously encountered.
Reading it accomplished a MAJOR retrofit in my sense of how the USA got to be the way it is today. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Tea Party and many trump supporters seem to adhere to the values of the original American Republicans [and to think that Black folk should be pushed back to a place where their feelings don't matter], and to long for a return to the status quo ante -- with ante referring to a time long LONG ago
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Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2016
★★★★★ 5
U.S. American Genesis
Format: Kindle
Kindle edition worked well. Very interesting and insightful read by a first rate historian. Tells the story of how our ancestors transitioned from Englishmen to Americans. A book well worth taking the time to read.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2022
★★★★★ 5
History at its best
This comprehensive history of early Virginia persuasively argues that slavery and racism contributed to the American notions of freedom and democracy for those not enslaved. Although first published in 1975, one would never guess that just from reading it. Morgan's argument emerges from such a careful reading and analysis of primary sources that it remains as important today as it was a quarter century ago. The book also provides valuable insights into many subjects other than slavery, including economic and political relations between Virginia and England, early interactions with Native Americans, and changing colonial and British notions of labor and class. Highly recommended on any of these issues.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2007
★★★★★ 5
Fasten your seat belt!
Format: Paperback
The eye-opening journey this non-fiction book offers is not fun, if you are any kind of human being at all. The historical detail and background information is great. The organization makes it easy to understand the complex and entangled events that were happening then and which molded colonial Virginian society, which in turn we inherited. Highest quality scholarship. Dreadful and stomach-turning subject matter. I wish I read this years ago.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2019