TelexFromCuba/GreatRecession/RipperStreet

Today I read the first fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s debut novel Telex From Cuba (2008), which is set in 1950s Cuba and tells the story of the country’s history from the perspective of a variety of American expatriates, all of whom are connected in some way with American business concerns in Cuba (for example, sugar cane and nickel mining) but who are otherwise very different in terms of their background and social class. In this opening section of the novel, Kushner chooses to tell different threads of her story through child narrators/protagonists, a canny choice that enables her to portray the classed, racialized, and gendered dimensions of American colonialism in Cuba with a lightness of touch and irony that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. In this way, her reader gets to appreciate the full range of the changes taking place in the Cuba of this period from something of a distance. Kushner thereby avoids didacticism while still conveying a sense of a society on the brink of a turbulent transition into independence.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Crash Fiction: American Literary Novels of the Global Financial Crisis,” Daniel Mattingly concludes that the literary fiction of the period that deals with the Great Recession focuses overwhelmingly on the fates of white middle-class men and eschews structural analyses of the financial system in favor of individualistic resolutions to financial problems and challenges. Sarah Domet, in “Mommy Porn, More or Less: Fifty Shades of Grey and Conservative Feminism in the New Economy,” discusses E.L. James’ blockbuster series of novels as a coded response to the newly prominent position of women in the workforce and the issues that prominence raises for women’s sense of self-identity. Finally, in “And They Lived Happily Ever After…or Not at All: (Un)Imagining African Americans in Recession-Era Popular Culture,” Maryann Erigha looks at how black characters have been a marginal presence, at best, in most Great Recession pop culture. When they do occupy a prominent place, Erigha argues, as in the films of Tyler Perry, they are given unrealistically feel good happy endings, endings that evade the real problems that African Americans actually face.

I also watched the fourth episode of Ripper Street. “The Good of This City” continues the show’s focus on respectable criminals. Even though the respectable citizens may not be the ones to fire the gun (they have lackeys to do the dirty work for them) they are usually the ones to give the orders. In some cases, they also exploit others more directly, but usually they choose their victims carefully in the sense that they target the most vulnerable. This dynamic indicates one of Ripper Street’s most fundamental targets, namely, the instrumental use of people by the powerful as if those people were expendable resources with no interiority or value of their own. Corruption in such a world is seemingly universal, with one important exception—Inspector Reid. The show’s image of the police as the incorruptible and idealistic defenders of all that is good and true is laughable in some ways but structurally indispensable to the coherence of the show.