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In short, prolepsis looks like evasiveness. Compared with the simplifications of melodrama, however, prolepsis has its virtues. Consider again Shamsie’s first sentence. The sentence does some unexpected negotiating: the cloud of smoke from the munitions factories that ends the sentence may foreshadow the mushroom cloud that is shortly to cover the city, but it is also a reminder that this peaceful-looking city is manufacturing munitions, hence is part of a war effort, hence in the eyes of some is not entirely distinguishable from the war’s more active battlefields. In other words, it contains the elements of an unpredictable conversation about whether, remembered by the survivor as gray, the day’s event should in fact be seen as gray and not, melodramatically, as black and white.
This impulse toward moral qualification may seem almost indecent, given what is being alluded to. And yet moral qualification is something we get again and again, and the examples suggest that we should not be sorry to get it. Go back to Rushdie’s account of the Amritsar massacre in Midnight’s Children. The announcement of the grandfather’s death “years later” doesn’t just reassure us that he is not killed here and now. Why are two place names given for the site of the grandfather’s later death, one of them Hindu and the other Muslim? And why are they separated by an “or”? At the moment of the massacre, the conflict between the British and the Indians seems the only meaningful conflict. Even at this moment of world-historical dreadfulness, however, Rushdie reminds the reader that in fact the confrontation of colonizers and colonized was never the only meaningful conflict. You cannot understand modern India, he suggests, without also thinking of the division between Hindus and Muslims, which began before the British came and continued after the British left. Even if the British deliberately made it worse, which by all accounts they did, the religious division cannot be attributed solely to colonial rule. Rushdie urges on to us this extra thought in the very act of describing an atrocity that is being committed by the British, which is to say at a moment when the temptation to locate absolute evil in the perpetrators is overwhelming. Prolepsis allows him to do this by stretching the temporality of the moment so as to include a future that will relativize even this world-historical evil, seemingly as absolute as evil can get.
oooh i like this a lot
There is no recipe for good writing, it hardly needs to be said, and this is as true for writing about atrocity as about any other kind. That is why it is so odd that literary accounts of atrocity so often resort to prolepsis, as in the “years later” that Arundhati Roy makes use of in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Here prolepsis does, again, what seems to be its thing. It empties out the present, rejecting as inadequate the subjective judgments of the characters immediately embroiled in the event. If you want to say no to the horror that lies before you — as you must, reading about an atrocity — you have to think in the long, long term. [...]
Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.
holy shit
CONSIDER THE VOICE OF Meek Mill. The inscription of dreams and nightmares in the grain. Its breathlessness, always on the verge of shrill hoarseness, gasping for air, as if the torrent of words can’t come fast enough — as if there might not be enough time to say the things that need to be said. Every syllable eked out through grit, the cold facts of North Philly firing through a monochromatic hollow, like a crack in a bell.
damn
IMAGINE A PEOPLE enthralled, gleefully internalizing the world of pure capital flow, of infinite negative freedom (continuously replenished through frictionless browsing), thrilled at the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification, the value in the network of one’s body, the harvesting of others. Imagine communities saturated in the vocabulary of cynical postrevolutionary blaxploitation, corporate bourgeois triumphalism, and also the devastation of crack, a schizophrenic cultural script in which black success was projected as the corporate mogul status achieved by Oprah or Jay-Z even as an angst-ridden black middle class propped up on predatory credit loans, gutted by the whims of financial speculation and lack of labor protections, slipped backward into the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained. Imagine, then, the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet. Imagine finally a vast supply of cheap guns flooding neighborhoods already struggling to stay alive. What would the music of such a convergence sound like?
TRAP IS A FORM OF soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below. This allows the trap artist to transition from an environment where raw hard power dominates and life is nasty, brutal, and short to the world of celebrity, the Valhalla of excess, lucre, influence, fame — the only transparently and sincerely valued site of belonging in our culture. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that insofar as you’re interested in having a good time, there’s probably never been a sound so perfectly suited to having every kind of fun disallowed in conservative America.
A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant. Hence the outsize importance of the latest black music (trap) in selling everything: Sweetgreen salads prepped and chopp’d by the majority minority for minimum wage, real estate roll-outs, various leisure objects with energetic connotations, the tastefulness of certain social gatherings. In the city of the mobile user and their memes, signs, processed and recoded desires, the desperate energy and beauty produced by the attempt to escape the narcocarceral jaws of death becomes a necessary raw fuel, a lubricant for soothing, or rather perfecting, the point of sale.
TRAP IS INVESTED in a mode of dirty realism. It is likely the only literature that will capture the structure of feeling of the period in which it was produced, and it is certainly the only American literature of any kind that can truly claim to have a popular following across all races and classes. Points of reference are recyclable but relatable, titillating yet boring, trivial and très chic — much like cable television. Sports, movies, comedy, drugs, Scarface, reality TV, food, trash education, bad housing: the fusion core of endless momentum that radiates out from an efficient capitalist order distributing itself across a crumbling and degraded social fabric, all the while reproducing and even amplifying the underlying class, racial, and sexual tensions that are riven through it.
The peculiar condition of being ceaselessly co-opted for another’s profit could arguably point to an impasse, to despair. But here’s the counter: the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.
saving this less for the thesis and more for the turns of phrase (esp the subject)
The money they saved arrived back in India through the imperial postal system. Letters carried promises of families reuniting and making America their home. But the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited immigrants from buying land. A 1920 report from the California State Board of Control described Indian workers as unfit for association with American people. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Indian men were ineligible for naturalized citizenship.
man