Claudia Rankine, interview:
On Hisham Matar’s The Return: “[it] does the thing I love best in literature. It takes a personal question (or a moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading.”
On Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval: “[it] created new pathways for me to think about archival work — what’s left unsaid, what’s documented, what goes undocumented in the making of a life.”