Jess Row - White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination — in conversation with Rion Amilcar Scott — at Politics and Prose at Union Market

Looking primarily at literature, but also at music and film, Row traces a literary “white flight” that parallels and bolsters the social movement of white Americans into segregated suburbs and gentrified communities. With attentive readings of work by mainstream authors including Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, and Jonathan Franzen, Row, author of the novel Your Face in Mine, shows how white writers have limited themselves to insulated imaginative spaces that have stymied any meaningful engagement with race. By contrast, James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, James Alan McPherson, and others offer models for how fiction can address matters of race and become not just a reflection of society but a reparative act. Row will be in conversation with Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and author of The World Does Not Require You.