Review: "Hyphen" by Pardis Mahdavi

Hyphen by Pardis Mahdavi
Published 2021 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

It is a tiny little line, the hyphen, and yet...

Mahdavi's take on the hyphen is less one for the punctuation nerds than you might think—I say this as someone who got a fair amount of joy out of reading a book about the semicolon and can be counted among those punctuation nerds. While there's a fair amount of punctuation history here (I would not have guessed the role the hyphen played in the Gutenberg Bible), Mahdavi narrows the kerning around the hyphen ever closer to focus on the role of hyphen in identity.

It took me a moment to get into the flow of Hyphen, as I went in expecting something more journalistic, while the reality is often closer to memoir. Through her own story and those of several others, Mahdavi charts what it can mean to be a "hyphenated American," from Roosevelt's appallingly xenophobic speech on the topic to her present-day reality. I was not familiar with the term "hyphenated American," and if you aren't either, I highly recommend looking it up. As someone with three citizenships and some other identities to boot, I love the framing of one being able to "embrace the space between," as Mahdavi says in the preface, rather than having to pick one or the other. (Identity politics get weirder with every additional place you've lived—I still don't have a simple answer for "where are you from?"—although as a white person the question is rarely addressed to me in accusation, which is not the case for many of the hyphenated Americans in this book.)

Mileage of individual books within this Object Lessons series will vary, but I cannot recommend the series itself enough for fellow nerds.