At the same time, I sense an emerging critical frustration around stories that excavate these questions. I’m also energized by deepening understandings of kinship that include our beyond-human relations, that extend to the earth itself and are informed by spiritual traditions and practices that endured despite the individualistic emphasis of Anglo-European modernity. I hope we’ll increasingly recognize the ways that those ideas so naturally complement our closer attention to the history of oppressive cultural systems (and the complicity of some of our ancestors in their construction). So I’m encouraged by our national preoccupation with ideas of intergenerational trauma. I wrote about these questions on my blog back in the aughts, sometimes in personal posts but also in broader ones about books and art and politics. All my life I’ve been drawn to stories and ponderings on the corrosive effects of family secrets, about recurring tendencies, wounds, and harms in individual families, and the reverberations of all this in the larger world. My first book, Ancestor Trouble, came out this year, and I remain as engaged with the concerns that preoccupied me while writing it as I was before it was published.
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