The Message
Charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad ... Instead of being the singular voice or the incomparable expert, Coates offers himself as an ally.
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Framed as a letter to Coates’s writing students at Howard University, and it is not a monograph about Palestine but a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as a kind of travelogue ... This is a book that asks to be evaluated as a piece of writing, and I will pay it the homage of holding it to the standard it sets for itself. In its guise as an aesthetic effort, it is not entirely successful ... It does not unearth new information, or paint much of a portrait of the places Coates visits. It is an aesthetic treatise and a compilation of personal reflections ... Frustratingly abstract, full of personal revelations and grand pronouncements without much in the way of concrete (or especially stylish) observation.
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Coates is living the advice he gives to his students in his book. He is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to 'complexity' and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity ... I am not exactly sure what to make of The Message, which, more than anything, is about the moral conversion of a famous writer.
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