OBAMA AND THE
CHALLENGE OF THE REAL
Symposium

Election day, 2008. After months of hand-wringing and check-writing, I arrive bright and early at the Obama headquarters in Ann Arbor only to be told that our county is awash in volunteers and that my time really would be better spent in Detroit. So I hop in our dented Camry and make my way to the city’s Obama Central, located in a dilapidated indoor shopping center whose few remaining stores are devoted to the selling of Afrocentric tschochkes.   I’m sent out with a burly African-American ex-Ford worker named David, with a list of street addresses at which to canvass. David knows some of these blocks and is not entirely happy with our assignment; nevertheless, off we go into a neighborhood where abandoned buildings (“crack houses?” I ask David; he makes a shushing gesture) ….read more….

Jonathan Rieder, “’I’m Going to Be a Negro Tonight’: Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and the ‘Postracial’ Paradox ”

Prudence L. Carter, “Longing to Lose the Skepticism: Race Relations and Educational Equity in the Obama Era”

Tiya Miles, “Obama and Big History”

Eric J. Sundquist, “Bending the Arc”

Essays

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Double Talk and Double Vision”

Deborah Eisenberg, “Fiction versus Consensus”

Heather Frese, “Fatigue”

Nicholas Delbanco, “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age”

Poetry

Jacqueline Osherow, “Variation on Variations (Picasso’s Las Meninas, 1957)”

Molly Fisk “The Color of Apricots”

Joe Betz, “Remembering the Prostitute in New York “

Fiction

Ben Stroud, “The Lime Soda Sea”

Review

John Taylor, “Two Hesitations about the Recent Fictions of J. M. G. LeClézio”

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