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A review by iambic
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Reading Tom Sawyer and thinking to myself over and over about that quote from Tara K. Menon in "The End of the English Major" about the tragedy of empire,
“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ” Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”
This is about reading Tom Sawyer for Percival Everett’s James. Not to say Tom Sawyer isn't good - it seems to pre-date and inform a lot of the trends and tropes in American contemporary pop culture, from Boy Sticks it to Man (yaaaaay Home Alone!) or Cave, Scary (thinking about Internet Historian's "Man in Cave" that gripped the internet (well, it certainly gripped me anyway) for a bit in 2022, and the MentalFloss article "The 1925 Cave Rescue That Captivated the Nation" it plagiarised/was based on). The drama of being a young boy! Running away! Causing mayhem! But the racism and stereotypes (both towards native Americans in the character of "Injun Joe" and the racial slurs) - not very sure how to deal with that.
“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ” Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”
This is about reading Tom Sawyer for Percival Everett’s James. Not to say Tom Sawyer isn't good - it seems to pre-date and inform a lot of the trends and tropes in American contemporary pop culture, from Boy Sticks it to Man (yaaaaay Home Alone!) or Cave, Scary (thinking about Internet Historian's "Man in Cave" that gripped the internet (well, it certainly gripped me anyway) for a bit in 2022, and the MentalFloss article "The 1925 Cave Rescue That Captivated the Nation" it plagiarised/was based on). The drama of being a young boy! Running away! Causing mayhem! But the racism and stereotypes (both towards native Americans in the character of "Injun Joe" and the racial slurs) - not very sure how to deal with that.