The Breaks

An Essay

By: Julietta Singh

Narrated by: Julietta Singh

A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive the looming political and ecological crises of our day, Singh contends, we must break from the conventions we have inherited, and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free.

The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the US’ stark binaries. With nuance and care, Singh connects the crises humanity faces - climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. Drawing upon feminist autotheory and the Black epistolary traditions of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Singh offers us her own generous invitation to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.

©2021 Julietta Singh (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Loved it

Beautifully written epistolary prose that both comforts and inspires, The Breaks gracefully situates wonderings about the meaning of motherhood within Singh’s personal politics and professional pedagogy as a professor of gender and sexuality studies. This text invites the reader to consider experimental forms of relation through a postcolonial lens, finding hope in the transformative potential of parent-child relationships within the midst of ecological crisis.

Trashcan of Ideology

Deeply myopic point of view. Full of ideological pitfalls resulting in an irony of what is supposedly opposed, namely, an unexamined and unethical way of being in the world.