Kevin as an Ally I find Kevin interesting because he serves different purposes for different audiences. He’s the embodiment of a good white character in a novel full of bad ones, to appease conservative readers who believe discussions of slavery are attacks against white people. Yet to someone paying closer attention, Kevin embodies the many flaws in white liberalism, making his character development in an even more racist society both a lesson in allyship and an interesting thought experiment. His entrance as a character is pretty rocky due to his tendency to put his foot in his mouth and his struggle to fully comprehend the danger that Dana is in for much of the book. Dana is acutely aware of everything that could go wrong for her when she journeys to the past, whereas Kevin clearly can’t fully put himself in her place to understand this. Much like many white people today, Kevin struggles to understand the full scope of racism because he has never had to experience it himself, w...
Berbelang is part of the art-napping Mu’tafikah, whose goal is to rescue non-western art from museums. The Mu’tafika believe that this art is stolen, because it was taken without permission from original cultures across Africa and Asia. Even worse, the art is kept in a sort of prison (museums). Not everyone has access to museums because of the entrance fee and their general seclusion, so the art is hidden from many people. Oftentimes the original purpose of the art was practical, maybe used in a ritual or as a religious symbol, and keeping it hidden in a museum does a disservice to the artifact. So basically, western nations have kidnapped artifacts, kept them in a place that is difficult to access, and are not using them in the way they were meant to be used. At first I didn’t understand what this had to do with Jes Grew. After all, those artifacts don’t mean much to people in America, they only mean something to the places from which they came. But as we learn later on, the culture i...