Hardback : £113.00
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.
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.
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Act I 1
Act II
Papa
The Vorburgers
Gramma
Act III
Reading List
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her most recent book is Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, also published by Duke University Press.
“With the understanding of a scholar and the storytelling instincts
of a novelist, Elizabeth A. Povinelli has brought a rare degree of
scope and insight to the graphic memoir form. Relatively few
illustrated works are so complex and insightful, so intricately
concerned with families, nationalities, and politics. An
extraordinary book.”
*The Hours*
“A melancholy yet often darkly funny reflection on the
intersections of biography, geography, kinship, and history, The
Inheritance is a genuinely original work that made an impact on
this reader and will leave a lasting mark on the field.”
*Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of
Ethics*
"An inspired use of the graphic format to weave a narrative with a
power beyond words alone." (Starred Review)
*Kirkus Reviews*
"This book is memoir, art, and anthropology, as it cleverly
addresses the interplay between individual lives and collective
experiences, thus inviting a more open and associative mode of
interpretation than most academic monographs.… This text
handles complex and contested social themes through sparing text
and provocative imagery and as such is a unique contribution to the
conversation on the legacies of European immigration to the United
States."
*Europe Now*
"This is a fascinating study of family persona and their changing
relationships, but it is not just an engaging family history. The
book is also an analysis of the historical context, 'the patterns
of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality' (p. xi)
that shape US society."
*Journal of Anthropological Research*
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