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Avenging Racism With Fiction: Rion Amilcar Scott Explores Lives In An Imaginary Town Founded By Rebel Slaves

Avenging Racism With Fiction: Rion Amilcar Scott Explores Lives In An Imaginary Town Founded By Rebel Slaves

Rion Amilcar, author of “The World Doesn’t Require You”. Amazon

Author Rion Amilcar Scott understands that you can face social issues head on and find a solution, even if through fiction. He does just this, according to glowing reviews, with his latest novel, “The World Doesn’t Require You.”

The book is a collection of short stories that use alternate history and satire to tackle the issues of race and sexism.

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The action takes place in a fictional community called Cross River, Md. 

“This is Scott’s second visit to Cross River, also home to his Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning 2016 ‘Insurrections.’ In addition to the above curiosities, the fictional town also lays claim to being the site of the only successful slave rebellion in U.S. history and is the meeting point of all sorts of past and present issues surrounding race,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

Rion

Cross River is opposite in every way to its neighboring white-dominated town of Port Yooga, and this is used to illustrate the contrasts and contradictions of society. 

Scott has said that “in my fiction I’m attempting to write about blackness in the varied and multitudinous ways that I’ve experienced it.”

“With Cross River I want to create something weird and elliptical and black,” Scott has said. With two books under his belt, Scott seems to have barely skimmed the surface of the many more characters and conflicts he could explore in Cross River.