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The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1
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... he had sex with his dead brother’s wife. It was left to his father, Judah, the fourth son of Jacob and Leah, to do the genealogical work of getting from Abraham to David via the body of his daughter-in-law. Two aspects of Jesus’s story speak to the role of the imagination in the history of how and why we represent descent as we do. One engages the ...

He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita

Amia Srinivasan: How Should I Refer to You?, 2 July 2020

What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She 
by Dennis Baron.
Liveright, 304 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 63149 604 2
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... or, in the view of people with dogs or cats, for dogs or cats. In 1792 the Scottish philosopher James Anderson noted that ‘it’ indicated ‘a high degree of contempt’, suggesting instead the gender-neutral pronoun ou, then common in Gloucestershire dialect. Kentucky’s 1850 Constitution declared: ‘The right of the owner of a slave to such ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... gothic in mood, but has a plainness and tact. Sometimes, in these pages, one wishes for what Henry James (apropos of Poe) called ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’.The best​ of the stories stand out because they slip the noose and allow contingency into their version of things. Henri Thomas’s ‘The ...

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