Song of a Reformed Headhunter

A very unusual gay love novel. It has romance, true, but the romance between the men is short-lived, whereas the lavender marriages continue in shadows and memories. The novel has as much, if not more, to say about the women who find themselves married to gay men as it does about the gay men themselves. And the lovers in the novel are not physically attractive. How could they be when they are disfigured by poverty, hard manual labor, and starvation, not only in rural China, but also in NYC, to which they emigrate with such hope? They are not ennobled by love; instead, they struggle to love and forgive. Finally, the novel is also a tender portrait of the Fuzhounese community living in East Broadway in NYC in the 80s, its scattering in the naughts, and the hardships of those who remain during the COVID pandemic. A genuinely poignant work, it deserves to be widely read by the LGBTQ community and beyond.

An immense scholarly achievement. Erudite, persuasive, and gracefully written, it is the kind of intellectual history that changes our understanding of ourselves, our ideas, our cultures, and our world. Yes, it focuses on the strain of anti-Judaism in Western thinking, but it is also about the making and writing of history more generally. Particularly I learned from its analysis of Marx. That in critiquing the evils of capitalism, Marx not only deployed the hated figure of the Jew, but also claimed the figure's reality in society. He thought he was doing sociology as well as economic theory, and so opened the possibility to future persecution of "real" Jews. It is too easy to slip from capitalism to Jewry in one's thinking. A fault that plagues the Left. 

"Ethnographies are mountains and endure," writes Dentan, but "theories are mayflies and don't." This work of ethnography is certain to endure like the mountain it is, and its theory about Semai peaceability is likely to be developed, strengthened, and affirmed by future ethnographers. To state its theory simplistically, Dentan argues that Semai peaceability originated as a functioning adaptation to Malay and British invasion, colonization, and child slavery. The Semai response to overwhelming violence, rape, and kidnapping is to flee, and when they cannot flee from the encroaching hegemonic state, to "surrender," in the author's specific sense of acting with the understanding that success is not within their control. The alternative is death and extinction. Semai elaborated this response into a religion of demon lovers (identification with one's oppressors), protective rituals, an egalitarian ethos, and a respectful way of raising kids, all des...