Coates’ Water Dancer and Peele’s Sunken Place
Please read the note and trigger warnings. I kept getting this idea about Get Out and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ wonderful novel The Water Dancer while reading it last November. Seven months later, I was amazed that no one else had written about it yet, apparently, so I did.
I also don’t feel I can write about Harriet Tubman in the book: her heroism, prophetic, religious visions, and disability: possibly epileptic seizures. I do think she’s a brilliant, respectfully fictionalized character here. I don’t mention her in the essay, but I’m curious to see what African American lit critics, historians, and disability studies scholars say about this book. It would also be really interesting, for example, to contrast her with Corrine!
You may have noticed some updates to my site. Like Book Riot itself, I’ve turned off WordPress comments. I’m definitely not the only person who was getting increasingly bizarre, spammy, sexist, ableist comments. Positive comments far outnumber them, but some people are not accountable when they can be anonymous.
Image: Stephen Colbert, saying, “Talk to the hand!”
I also updated some links on my main menu as old, archived work became available. I’m happy that Wordgathering’s archives are online again. While checking for the archives, I found more syllabi . . .
My Le Guin essay that I wrote in 2009 and self-published on Medium in 2018 is frequently taught with Le Guin. My 2012 Infinite Jest essay (published in Wordgathering in 2017) is frequently taught with David Foster Wallace too. This is me on a syllabus for a whole course on Infinite Jest!
I replaced the links to a couple of old BR articles on HP/JKR with cached versions from archive.org. I like this option because it saves a readable writing sample and record of my publication while not generating any more Amazon traffic for Rowling.
Grace Lapointe 