'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."
Those familiar with the American essayistic tradition will no doubt immediately note the titular invitation, made here, to place Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity in conversation with Joan Didion's The White Album. 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.
Much of the work of is about articulating those stories of brown America thatKhakpour's work is correction and visibility: about centering the brownness that has been erased from this literary cultural analysis — and accompanying conversations.
