LaValle

    The aspect of “We Travel The Spaceways” that was the most interesting to me was how LaValle worked bits of our modern society into his version of the future. The most obvious example of this is the name Grimace. I love that no matter how much the world around will change, there is always a guarantee of McDonald’s. While it brings a smile at first, it is moments like these that make the reader realize how little the future might change if we do not do the work to make it different. The story opens with Grimace’s distaste for that name compared to the other McDonald’s mascots and uses it as the set up for Grimace’s situation as a homeless black man. “I do not like that nickname… If I make a fuss about it, the local store owners would just call the police; between them and me, it’s easy to guess who’d get handcuffed” (LaValle 3). He starts with something familiar, McDonald’s, so that the presence of something even more deeply rooted in our society, racism, has a bigger impact. We see through these examples that the future LaValle is trying to portray is a cautionary tale more than a look forward. While other texts we have read this semester have made ideas about race a nonfactor, or a positive, LaValle immediately plants readers in a world where the issues of racism are still present. As the story continues on, other aspects of it: the soda they drink, the reference to the Titanic,  the places they go, are ones that we are familiar with today and further feed the narrative that the future is not necessarily going to be this ideal world we imagine. Reading this text in contrast with the other ones this semester that often felt so distant was a really good experience and I’m glad I had the chance to feel a bit more grounded in the class because of it.

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