How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat

Nicholas Powers

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2018, vol. 77, issue 3-4, 645-656

Abstract: A manifesto written in the form of a letter is a tradition in the African American canon, one that undergoes a radical revision in this essay. Whether in My Dungeon Shook, the first section of James Baldwin’s 1963 classic The Fire Next Time or Ta‐Nehisi Coates’s 2015 Between the World and Me, the strategy was a pedagogical one. The double work being done in these texts was to use a stated reader, in each case a family member, to grant the writer an intimacy that guaranteed the larger claims made on racism in America. Yet both writers seemed ultimately to elude that stated reader for a not too implicit, liberal white reader. In “How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat,” the text reverses this tactic to ask what a new life teaches us about racism and the desire for human connection it frustrates. The time frame is the end of the Obama presidency, where there was a hint of hope, even if it was betrayed. It ends shortly after November 2016 when white Americans chose a president who threatened to initiate a new neo‐Jim‐Crow era and asks: How does the endless, generative power of life teach a man of color to love during a politically reactionary time?

Date: 2018
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