Saïd Khatibi’s ‘The End of the Sahara,’ the first Algerian crime novel translated from Arabic by Bitter Lemon Press, potently critiques Orientalist fantasies of desert romance.
Humans are evolutionarily drawn to beauty. How do such complex experiences emerge from a collection of atoms and molecules?
The moral of the story is “don’t tell stories about these big topics if you can’t do it well.” And by “well,” I don’t mean create a post-racial utopia. I mean have the ability to give that story its own weight and importance beyond what it does for your two white leads. I mean the very least you can do is not make Jamie and Claire white saviors. At the very least. But that isn’t possible because they are the people this story is about.
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