'Brown Album' Centers On The Erasure Of Race In American Culture
A few paragraphs into "A New Persian Empire," the prefatory essay of her new collection Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour writes: "Since 9/11, we have been living in a winter of discontent after more than three decades of discontentment."
Like Didion's essay collection, Khakpour's newest work is anchored in the personal and the socio-political as she embeds her intellectual investigations within cultural events in California and builds outward to the universal.
Khakpour's work, however, is centered in the very telling erasure that has always permeated Didion's work: race in America.
However, in both its stereotypical language towards whiteness and its blanket dismissal of a type of intellectual inquiry, this statement was not inclusive to all of the students in Khakpour's low residency MFA classroom at the time, specifically the students who inhabited either of the identity groups dismissed in Khakpour's tweet: whiteness or writing students who valued Didion's contribution to the American literary tradition.
One wonders if one substituted "black people" for "white people" in Khakpour's tweet, and "James Baldwin" for "joan didion," if Khakpour would think differently about the effect of her words on all students.
