The two girls rehearse Michael Jackson’s moves during recess, and Tracey is convinced her rarely seen father is one of his backup dancers. The characters in Smith’s book forge their own canon in a world where they don’t match history’s representation. The girls grow apart but often reunite throughout the course of the book as it continuosly explores class, friendship, fandom and role models. The two attend a white classmate’s birthday party but are picked up early by the narrator’s mother after the birthday girl’s mom sees them dancing “provocatively” to the music of a pop star named Aimee. Identity brings the two girls together, despite family dynamic and class differences. The two meet in a local dance studio and immediately become friends after realizing they are the only “brown” students in the class. Smith delves into the lives of two girls growing up in London’s public housing, the boisterous Tracey and a more reserved unnamed narrator. Swing Time digs into this, with class differences at the center of the story and race also playing a factor. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, this summer. It’s also a problem in our representation of history, as witnessed in the unrest surrounding the removal of the Robert E. This isn’t only a problem in our literary canon, however. The canon we read is overwhelmingly beige - when I offered to review this book, the editor was excited that I would blog about a novel by a person of color.
The professor assured us that this was not a shaming exercise the point was to become more conscious of how our unseen influences shape our perceptions and our writing. Only one in a class of around 15 could raise a hand. He next asked if anyone’s list contained four or more people of color, women, those spanning the LGBTQ spectrum or working class.
Then he had us fill in their lifespan, nationality, ethnicity/race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, religion and class.
The professor had us pick the seven writers we found to be the most important to us (novelists, journalists, lyricists, etc.). In that same class we did an exercise on the diversity of our literary canon. We read Zadie Smith in my Creative Non-Fiction class at Notre Dame last year.
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