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The Inheritance
Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s inheritance was passed down not through blood or soil but through a framed map of Trentino, Alto Adige—the region where family's ancestral alpine village is found. Far more than a map hanging above the family television, the image featured colors and lines that held in place the memories and values fueling the Povinelli family's fraught relationships with the village and with each other. In her graphic memoir The Inheritance , Povinelli explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Weaving together stories of her grandparents' flight from their village in the early twentieth century to the fortunes of their knife-grinding business in Buffalo, New York, and her own Catholic childhood in a shrinking Louisiana woodlands of the 1960s and 1970s, Povinelli describes the serial patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality that have shaped not only her life but the American story. Plumbing the messy relationships among nationality, ethnicity, kinship, religion, and belonging, The Inheritance takes us into the gulf between the facts of history and the stories we tell ourselves to survive and justify them.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published March 26, 2021
2 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
14Ìýbooks42ÌýfollowersElizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 15, 2024
To write a successful graphic family memoir, write "Fun Home." Oh, but it's taken. Well, if you DON'T live in a funeral home, & if you don't have a closeted gay dad--what else is there? Plenty to write about, obvi. But now a topic must be chosen, one people can relate to universally, all the while embracing the uniqueness of the prose, the illustrations, the life story.
This one is so special. Never before has white guilt become such an intregal part of the story. That despite all hardships, we (minorities), don't have it as bad as other marginalized populations.
"I may have inherited a historical problem, but unlike others, I was not colored in as a problem of history." (310)
And so while we could spend the whole book feeling maltreated by the fates, it is decided that keeping everything balanced is better. Check out how Povinelli fills her pages with watercolors and very ugly caricatures of her siblings as children. They need to be more substantial, she seems to say, and that only comes with age, wisdom, and experience.
Find it, read it!
This one is so special. Never before has white guilt become such an intregal part of the story. That despite all hardships, we (minorities), don't have it as bad as other marginalized populations.
"I may have inherited a historical problem, but unlike others, I was not colored in as a problem of history." (310)
And so while we could spend the whole book feeling maltreated by the fates, it is decided that keeping everything balanced is better. Check out how Povinelli fills her pages with watercolors and very ugly caricatures of her siblings as children. They need to be more substantial, she seems to say, and that only comes with age, wisdom, and experience.
Find it, read it!
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November 29, 2024An unexpectedly compelling graphic memoir that explores topics of identity, trauma and memory � and how each is passed down. I was struck by this book’s emotional honesty, as well as the approachability of its illustrations.
October 30, 2021
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April 23, 2021
lovely story-telling installment. How do we re-orient the flow and rhythm of life of "readers"? Genres do matter! Originally I was a little suspicious of the genre, but as I read on, alas, I must admit that the "book" -- with its carefully crafted visual and speech stimuli -- mesmerizing. And as a book given by a reputed social analyst and enticing you to read something analytical, something like cultural and historical-political meta-comments, the book is one without you needing to take notes. The thoughts of the author get into your mind in an embodied form -- through a sort of intuitive encounter between the non-linear-non-textual stimuli and your attention right here and right now. That is a fantastic reading experience of learning "anthropological reflections" as part of our reflective, very humanly consciousness. We do need more excursions in genres if anthropology is to thrive and contribute to real knowledge -- that is, what is going on actively in people's minds!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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