A modern resonance - shootings in Dhalgren

"Erich Schneider [email protected] [delany-list]" <[email protected]> Thu, 11 Aug 2016 09:57:23 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.culture.sf.delany
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Reading *Dhalgren* again, a thing that particularly strikes me is the
many recurring references to a sniper, probably white, atop the Second
City Bank building, who shoots one or more black people in the street
below. Reading them this month, it recalls the feeling I have gotten
many times in the past few years with each new report of a black man
or woman being shot down by police or a vigilante for no good reason -
"oh God, another one?"

One of the people shot in *Dhalgren* is Paul Fenster, the black civil
rights activist. I have to wonder if this recurring element was meant by
Delany to evoke the stream of prominent killings in America in the
'60s - JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., RFK - and the similar
feeling I have heard went through people then. (I was born in 1971,
so, before my time.)

-- 
Erich Schneider  [email protected]


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Posted by: Erich Schneider <[email protected]>
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