The Breaks: An Essay

By Julietta Singh

Book Overview

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up childrens' radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive the looming political and ecological crises of our day, Singh contends, we must break from the conventions we have inherited, and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and brown girlhood, complicating the US's stark binaries. With nuance and care, Singh connects the crises humanity faces--climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. Drawing upon feminist autotheory and the Black epistolary traditions of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Singh offers us her own generous invitation to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566896169
• ISBN13: 9781566896160
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.8"