The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar
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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 19.4.24
some notes on Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain —
- I’m uneasy with the handling of the woman’s position within the university. obviously a certain amount of the way Samatar portrays her is autobiographical: the ambivalence about research, aboud diversity initiatives, about the ways committee work distracts from the other kinds of work the university is “supposed” to make possible. but insofar as the book’s answer to the question it poses — “Can the university be a place of both training and transformation?” — is a resounding no, not because training and transformation are incompatible (the Practice is, after all, a discipline) but because the university is incompatible with either goal, it feels too easy. Samatar herself continues, after all, to work within a university. I think A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories (especially) did a better job engaging with their characters’ failings and ambiguities. here, it feels like once the professor realizes just how tight her bonds are she’s immediately absolved from any complicity in the system that she’s been upholding.
- (on that note, very funny that Samatar thanks Harney and Moten for The Undercommons when this book reaches the opposite conclusion — that there is no ethical relationship to the university as such, to a university that’s legible as “the university”.)
- perhaps I’m being unfair, though — not just because of the autobiographical element but also insofar as the professor’s narrative is about the recognition of false consciousness, as she finds her proverbial masque blanc torn away to reveal the peau noire underneath and realizes that there is no possibility of liberation at the end of the path she’s been traveling. whether or not I’m suspicious of the ease with which Samatar reaches this conclusion vs. the difficulty of implementing it, it is unequivocally the correct conclusion. also, who am I to talk? lol.
- where is the agency of the chained here? obviously the boy still identifies with/as chained, but as he’s all too aware he isn’t actually chained anymore. I think the book would have benefited from integrating the prophet’s daughter’s perspective, at least. being ankleted may have — as the book asserts — significant continuities with being chained, but it is not (automatically) the same: the boy and the woman both by virtue of being ankleted have significant options to take political action; the chained remain objects.
- the Practice. holy shit. I think this would pair really interestingly with Daibhidh Eyre’s Cailèideascop (which I still think is excellent but whose politics pale in comparison), from which it takes the logical next step. if we are all connected, if the chains — visible and invisible — that bind us also tie us to others, then we are each other’s most important tools for liberation. not only are none of us free until all of us are free, but we get free only in and through our relationships to each other and the work we do together. “‘Now,’ he said, ‘we pull.’”
- the least developed of the three terms in the title is the horizon. I’m currently rereading Laurie Marks’s Elemental Logic books, however, and thinking about Marks’s mediation on political change: the horizon is neither up nor down but out, endlessly; neither looking upwards towards the “free” nor downwards in fear of the chained, but outwards into the possibilities that the false dichotomies we’re presented with seem to have foreclosed. “tha fhios gu bheil fàire / eile air fàire”.
- not an unflawed book, but nonetheless a very good one.
moods: challenging, hopeful, inspiring, reflective
webring >:-]
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