Reviews for Blueprints: a way of life

The average rating for Blueprints: a way of life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-12 00:00:00 Angela Railsback I OFFICIALLY GIVE UP! What the flying fuck did I just read?!?! How in the world is this a landmark of black feminist text???? I could actually write a dissertation on how fucked up this book is, but I don't even want to put enough effort into writing a proper review on how much I hated this! DNF @ 75% when Wallace essentially says: yes black people were stolen and forced into deplorable slavery but white people were also sold as slaves so like....... We're lucky I wasn't near a fireplace or something because when I read that line I actually chucked the book so far from me I looked like a cartoon character. Bullshit. (I will say though there was some nice critical lines that I enjoyed.. but honestly I don't even know how to consume them. Are they satirical? Are they genuine? Is she saying these things only to use as a contrast to the insane claims she wants to make later?? I really couldn't figure out what the fuck the author was doing with this book. The funny thing is, I read it with the 2 updated forwards!!! And it was still trash!!!)

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-14 00:00:00 Larry Coon I understand that this is one of the earlier books to cover its ground. Wallace is writing about the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles as someone who actually grew up during this period and experienced the zeitgeist. Looking back on it in her own introduction, she says she had an impulse to destroy the book, to stop anyone reading it ever again, a familiar impulse on reading your own earlier bold assertions and analyses which now seem so embarrassingly flawed and limited.I wanted to destroy the book because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black woman writer could ever offer was so palpable in its pages. In obsessively repeating the stereotypes of black women and black men, I wanted to burst free of them forever. However, this has only been slightly more possible for me than it was for Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs and Charlotte Forten. But perhaps if we can begin to claim our own words and our own feelings within the public sphere, we will seize the means of re-producing our own history, and freedom will become a possibility in a sense that it never has been before.Accordingly, though I was moved by many of her insights and the autobiographical details she shares, I often felt that Wallace's criticism of black people and of the Black Power movement was sharp, harsh, rough around the edges. More compassionate analyses can be found in the work of black feminist writing by, for example, bell hooks (especially We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity) and Patricia Hill Collins. Yet Wallace's work shouldn't be overlooked. Her perspective as a witness as well as analyst and intellectual, as deeply involved in her material, is irreplaceable, and later writers stand on her shoulders.