Jackson Rising Review - On Our Nightstands July 2020

Books in Review

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya

I read a lot of fiction by female authors, and have sought out work by female authors of color recently. Someone in my family’s communal Kindle account had checked out Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, which I began to read one evening and found I couldn’t put down, despite the author’s eschewal of punctuation. It won the Booker Prize last year, and yet I hadn’t heard much about it. It’s wonderful—a sprawling novel that charts the fates and fortunes of 12 different Black British women across the 20th century. Each woman’s story is embedded within a larger social landscape that considers the nation’s many transformations. Evaristo explores her characters with humor and generosity, leading us through such milieus as London’s underground lesbian theater scene, the politics of education in Thatcher’s England, and contemporary debates in trans-inclusive feminism. Despite such serious topics, the prose is light and sings with joy, a celebration of Black women within the UK’s complicated politics and history. In exploring Black female collective life in Britain, Evaristo reveals their integral role within the former metropole, as important though often unacknowledged political actors and agents of change. In so doing, she brings attention to the salience of race as a question not limited to colonial exploits, but rather entwined in the production of contemporary British gendered relations, political projects, and imagined futures.

As protests continue to rage over the murder of George Floyd and the more generalized expendability of Black life, meanwhile, I have revisited Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, a collection edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya, which looks to the Cooperation Jackson experiment in the Mississippi Delta. There, activists who emerge out of a long tradition of radical Black politics formulated the Jackson-Kush Plan, a holistic economic proposal that seeks emancipation through practices of economic solidarity and cooperative-based models. As I think about BLM and how to be an ally in this moment, I am drawn to the local scale and find instructive this group’s work advancing radical causes through the modest yet no less audacious arenas of everyday collective action. Their most recent project has been designing and manufacturing high-quality 3D-printed masks to combat COVID in Jackson, a city beset by inadequate health care and entrenched legacies of racialized inequality.