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A review by benplatt
Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life by Dawn Lundy Martin
4.0
A formally interesting collection that pokes at frames, boxes, and categories while purposefully refusing to cohere on any recognizable terms of its own. It's a book of fragments and pieces that don't fit together, and a number of the pieces are compelling in their own right. I wish the "structured absences" of blackness and the way sin which limitations simultaneously generate and constrain, both of which are touched on here, were more of a focus; I guess I wanted deeper, not wider. What do we do once we recognize the box, the limitation, the social constructedness and the absence that lies in opposition to that construction? What comes after deconstruction? How does it interact with the material reality of the world (which again is touched on in this collection's focus on bodies, containers in their own right, but that I wanted more of)?
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.