Marlon JamesBlack Leopard, Red Wolf

Abstract

characters who dreamed of migrating to the United States in some way, shape, or form. The Other Americans follows up on those dreams and gives nuance to previously articulated depictions of migration to America. Additionally, although the plotline of the text is fictitious, elements of Lalami’s nonfiction work (e.g., her New York Times essay “What Does It Take to ‘Assimilate’ in America?”) are readily discernible in the story arc she creates throughout the novel. Overall, The Other Americans is a thrill to read. It theorizes the “American Dream” by putting it into conversation with racial and socioeconomic categories. It questions the role of family loyalty. It introduces us to the struggles of Americans on the margins, and it wraps everything up neatly around the story’s pivotal moment: an accident that may or may not have been a crime. Lalami ’s finely tuned analysis of contemporary America is insightful and, at times, biting in its critique. Jocelyn Frelier Sam Houston State University Naomi Shihab Nye The Tiny Journalist Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism , it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from the suffering of others. Before reading The Tiny Journalist, I was thoroughly cordoned off from the IsraeliBooks in Review Marlon James Black Leopard, Red Wolf New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 640 pages. Fantasy, as we’re familiar with it in the global genre market, is a primarily Western -centric affair shaped by the writing of white men with many initials—J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. R. R. Martin— and circulated further through successful film and TV adaptations. (China, too, is a major player in fantasy, but its texts have had little influence outside the sinophone world.) Decades of arguments about what constitutes fantasy aside, there is no doubt that fantasy is a matter of great importance to world literature and culture and that fantasy from the postcolonial world has tended to be received in the literary market under the name “magical realism.” Jamaican writer Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is not magical realism. Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his historical novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (about Jamaica, reggae, and the geopolitics of crack in the 1970s–1990s), James has written a work of epic fantasy that draws on African stories and traditions, on the textual and material worlds of subSaharan Africa, and on a century of literary, generic, and popular-cultural influences to bring a bold, violent, and challenging world to life. Black Leopard, Red Wolf tells the sixhundred -plus-page story of Tracker and his search for a missing child with a company of adventurers (friendly and otherwise), including the werecat Leopard, the giant Sadogo, and the witch Sogolon. In response to James’s “experiment” slumming with epic fantasy, critics have repeatedly (and happily) cited similarities with Tolkien, Martin, and Robert E. Howard (creator of pulp fantasy hero Conan) and noted that James brings his literary flare for experimentation, poetic language, and the vulgar grittiness of reality to their fantasy worlds. They aren’t wrong, but the discourse is telling. James’s success setting the literary world abuzz about a fantasy novel, of all things, suggests what many have long known: in some ways, the old boundaries between genre and literature have become more fluid; in others, they have become more rigid. Repeated comparisons to Tolkien, Martin, and Howard betray a shallow understanding of contemporary fantasy and ignore the lengthy history of Afrofantasy that has run parallel to the now-popular Afrofuturism. What’s more, James’s novel fits best with the hope-effacing tone of grimdark, though even there it is somewhat out of place, proffering a sly, self-besmirching nihilism in place of grimdark’s typically bleak one. In this fantastic Africa, Tracker and Leopard at times seriously proclaim, and occasionally mock, their shared motto that MARLON JAMES 80 WLT SPRING 2019 Rae Armantrout Wobble Wesleyan University Press Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and California native Rae Armantrout’s provocative collection of poetry, Wobble, was a nominee for the 2018 National Book Awards and...