Sophia Gendron

Ms. Koza

AP Literature Pd./5

October 2023

Swing Time Book Review Abstract

Swing Time is a complex and nuanced connection of style, structure and theme, and the way those three elements are connected is why it’s bad to read. It dissects the colonial racism and ideologies that have persisted in our society, and how they’ve become so integrated in our day to day life they’re unconscious. The most prominent example in Swing Time was a story the narrator and her best friend wrote as kids, describing a “lily white dancer” whose legs get broken by an iron bar of African men “lurking in the shadows”. These ideologies can be traced back to stories and works like Heart of Darkness, calling Africans or blacks “wild and untamed”. Post colonialism as a theme gets tied into style and structure through distortion of words’ identities; the way they are twisted, manipulated, and the original meaning is eventually lost. The idea connects to Exterminate All the Brutes, which detailed examples of words becoming colonized and transformed from their original meaning into a twisted new one. The paragraphs of Swing Time are long and rambling, which can make a reader’s mind lose the original meaning of the passage. It becomes draining and confusing, reading about a woman looking for her identity while trying to remember where you are in the story. In this way, Swing Time parallels the messages of Exterminate All the Brutes, in the results of distorted identity. The complicated nature and messages of Swing Time is the reason it is a good book, but also the reason it was a confusing and tiring book to read.

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash