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InAn American Summer, veteran journalist Alex
Kotlowitz ties together vignettes of Chicagoans
in the aftermath of violence and death within
their predominantly black neighborhoods. The
wrenching portraits center on themes of love
and forgiveness. A mother of a slain man wants
restorative justice for her son’s killer; a teen
must grapple with witnessing his classmate
bleed out; a young woman watches her child-
hood friend stuck in the revolving door of the
criminal justice system.
We’ve read versions of these stories in the news—and seen
them used to advocate for solutions to the systemic problems
that plague cities. Kotlowitz’s work does this. But he confronts
his readers with a challenge even before they open the book:
Can you consider this “an American summer”?
Kotlowitz argues that the devastation of black Chicago is
just as emblematic of the season as enjoying a hot dog at a
ballpark. Summer, in art and life, isn’t always carefree—it can
be heated, uneasy, violent. And for the 965 people wounded
and killed in Chicago during the 2013 period when the book
takes place—mostly black Americans—it represents a thin line
between life and death. Kotlowitz says he wrote his book,
which was released in March, in the hope that “these stories
will help upend what we think we know.”
Artists have long used the word “American” as a tool to
make us reckon with troubling or complicated versions of who
we are. FX’s hit Russian spy dramaThe Americansjust capped
off six seasons of subverting visions of domestic life. The film-
makers behindAmerican BeautyandAmerican Pastoralused
the word to capture a plaster-perfect white vision of the coun-
try, then probed the flaky fissures under its surface.
Like Kotlowitz, author Tayari Jones focuses on people of
color for herNew York Timesbest-selling book,An American
Marriage. The 2018 novel traces the rise and fall of a union
between two young black professionals in Atlanta after the
husband, Roy, is wrongly convicted and sent to prison for
years. At first, Jones, who is black, joked about her title to theCRITIC Bloomberg Pursuits August 5, 2019Houston Chronicle: “I told my editorAn American Marriage
sounded like a novel about some white people in Connecticut
experiencing feelings.”
Her decision to place that title on the book is what drew
Oprah Winfrey to it, and the media mogul ended up putting
it on her influential book list. Scores of commuters now hold
Jones’s book on subways and planes, carrying this message fur-
ther: The story of a black husband and wife ensnared in the
prison system is a fair depiction of the modern-day pressures
facing couples in this country. Move over,Kramer vs. Kramer.
Expect to see more like this. In March, Moroccan-born
author Laila Lalami unleashed the murder mysteryThe Other
Americans. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s epic love story
Americanah, about a Nigerian American immigrant, is being
adapted into a miniseries with Lupita Nyong’o.
They couldn’t come at a more pivotal time, when the pres-
ident takes to Twitter (truly the littlest form of literature) to
stoke debate over who gets to come here and
who may remain. Your race, even if you’re a
citizen, like the four congresswomen of the
Democratic “squad,” might become an argu-
ment for you to be sent away.
For most of the country’s history, white peo-
ple were the only ones given space in books,
theater, and films to be fully human. And cre-
ators are pushing back. This year the Pulitzer
Prize went to playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury,
whose playFairviewexamines the phenom-
enon of white watching. She methodically shows how only
certain types of black stories are told to mass audiences, then
explodes the guardrails around them—breaking the barrier
between the set and the seats and leaving white members of
the audience onstage while the black cast moves out to replace
them in the aisles. It’s a forceful subversion of who gets to be
“in” the story.
In early 2019, Broadway’sAmerican Son, starring Kerry
Washington and Steven Pasquale, told of interracial par-
ents who spend a night in a Florida police station waiting
for word of their missing son. Written by a white playwright,
Christopher Demos-Brown, it grimly brings to life the fears
parents of black children live with, and its chilling conclu-
sion brings to mind Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, boys
whose stories ended in a way we know all too well.American
Sonis being adapted for Netflix, where it will appear in the
“recommended for you” fields of people who watched
Scandal—the streaming version of a glimpsed book jacket
on a plane, quietly drawing your attention.
These “American” works are moving the tales of
black people from the “African American” section of the
bookstore to the front table, a powerful advance. There,
these narratives of everyday life are better positioned to
meet and contradict divisive fictions emanating from poli-
tics and the media. They’re inclusive stories whose strength
comes from the complex world where Americans actually
live, grow, and dream. <BW>Forget politics. Books and
plays are forcing audiences to
reexamine a word
that’s as charged as ever
By Jordyn HolmanWho Gets to Be
An ‘American’?
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