We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed.

Writer Elif Shafak in her TED talk The Politics of Fiction (embedded below). Shafak was prosecuted for her novel about a family’s women set against the Turkish-Armenian conflict. A nice compliment to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk The Danger of a Single Story.

Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

That’s from the epilogue of Eric Weiner’s tremendously fun book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. It doesn’t reveal any great secrets about happiness. But it’s a well-written, funny travelogue about one man’s mission to find the happiness formula.

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.

From Dwight Garner’s article Chinua Achebe’s Encounters With Many Hearts of Darkness in the New York Times. Garner’s piece is a review of Achebe’s new collection of essays The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays. That quote is part of a longer passage in the book.

If you are in the gift buying mood, I am not opposed to receiving this.

Latin America is extravagant and irrational, nothing can be done about it; its dictators are savages and inhumane, but we miss them as characters of a novel; and we find solace in its inhabitants’ ability to maintain their will to dream in the middle of poverty and injustice. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is very nice to be exotic, to brown under the sun and to be neighbors with criminals and torturers, to populate chaotic and bloody cities, to believe in voodoo or in the Virgin of Guadalupe, to belong to such gracious and unusual nations.

In his talk, Volpi criticizes the concept of a Latin American genre of fiction defined by a belief in or resignation to the supernatural. Volpi believes that such a thing ignores the rich literary diversity of Latin America. It’s a pernicious form of stereotyping that limits writers, readers, and regions.

This paragraph in particular caught my attention because I think it is the way most Southern nations and peoples are viewed and treated by the European-American establishment. Tan, brown and black people are almost universally deemed less modern, more regressive, and in need of either saving or punishment depending on your political leanings. This plays out in the fiction world when we expect that the work of Southern nations writers will be more tortured, more magical or just plain different somehow than that of their European or American counterparts. And if it isn’t, it is not authentic.

Perhaps this is part of a larger discussion about art, authenticity and representation. Is it ever possible for an ‘Othered’ artist to make art without being Positive and Uplifting^TM or An Authentic Representation of the Group Experience^TM?

Also see: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story, and Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2005 Granta essay How to Write About Africa.

[Via The Millions]

* Chil’ please. Yes I know Africa is a continent of 47 countries, give or take some disputed territory and excluding islands off the coasts. But how many times have you heard the place spoken of as though it was one big ass nation full of black people somewhere over there?

Genre-wise, I’m open to anything but science fiction. I will make an exception, though, if the writing is good.

So: got any suggestions?

Rarely can a book manage to be both funny and serious. Martha Southgate has managed to do just that with her novel, “Third Girl from the Left,” which is fresh out in paperback ($12.95; Mariner Books. Paperback released September 5, 2006).

Southgate’s novel tells the story of three generations of women — Mildred, her daughter Angela and granddaughter Tamara — using their shared love of movies as a foundation for their story.

Most of the novel centers around Angela, a former blaxploitation actress who left the stifling (as she saw it) culture of Tulsa, Oklahoma to become an actress in anything-goes Los Angeles. Her dream was to become a movie star. Instead she fell in love with a woman who became her life partner, although she rejects the labels “lesbian” and “dyke.”

Mildred, Angela’s mother, is a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. For her, movies are an escape — a way to vicariously experience how others live. Movies — rather, the movie theater’s projection man is also an escape for her. Eventually Mildred is confronted with having to choose what is expected of her or doing what she wants.

Tamara, Angela’s daughter, makes movies. That she makes films is progress. Though she struggles to make ends meet and produce her thesis film, she is confident in her craft. For her, creating movies becomes a chance to give voice to herself and be a voice for those women who came before her.

Throughout the novel, the women struggle to escape or change what other people think. In Mildred’s case, it was the notion that a proper woman is a homemaker. For Angela, it’s small town gossip and sexual standards. With Tamara, it’s being a black woman filmmaker when her mother and society tells her that it might not happen.

Rather than the heavy-handed, sometimes somber tone of other black women writers with similar themes, Southgate manages to make her writing fun and accessible to a pop-fiction audience. With this novel Southgate reveals the complexity of black women’s struggle for self-worth and self-definition.

Rohinton Mistry wrote a masterpiece with this book. Set in India during the 1975 State of Emergency under Indira Gandhi, A Fine Balance is the heartbreaking story four people whose lives were profoundly interwined and profoundly changed by the cultural norms and the government’s choices.

Ishvar and Om leave the cruel, caste-based violence of their rural Indian village to work as tailors for a Parsi woman, Dina, in the (unnamed) city. Dina also rents a room in her flat — left to her after her husband was killed in an accident — to a university student named Maneck, who is the son of a former schoolmate.

Without giving away too much of the story and writing too long of a blog post, let me say this: Mistry manages to capture the fragile existence of living in a rapidly modernizing society with extreme polarities of wealth and income. Some of the incidents Mistry describes are horrifying when they aren’t merely heartbreaking. His words capture both the beauty and cruelty of humanity. A fantastic read.

I agree — not that I’ve read scads of books to compare. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-prize winner is just incredibly rich, complex and multilayered. It’s one of a few books that I’ve read twice, and I may just re-read it again this summer. It’s by far my favorite, followed closely by Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” (Also known as The Black Broads’ Literary Canon. )

Since summer (and hopefully a summer vacation) is a’coming, I’m sure we’re all looking to boost our reading lists, right?

So I’d like to know:

• What’s your favorite book (include why if you’re so inspired)?
• What book are you currently reading / have you most recently read?
• Have you read any of the books mentioned in that Times’s piece, and if so, what did you think?
• What books do you plan to read this summer (or at some point)?