The Matter of Black Living

“With new historical insight and indispensable analysis of the social survey, the photograph, and the motion picture, Autumn Womack calls for an urgent rethinking of the information technologies, data regimes and disciplinary measures employed to enumerate black social life. From reading Zora Neal Hurston’s filmic practices through an aesthetic of overexposure to conceptualizing “looking out” as a capacious mode of perception and praxis, The Matter of Black Living reveals the ruptures and possibilities of black creative innovation. A brilliant read.” * Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin *
“The Matter of Black Living elucidates the breadth and the reach of black ontological possibility and the historical trajectory of black self-expression that (white) modernist practices forgot. Womack cogently presents the unwieldy negotiations of social knowledge and data collection that have impacted African American cultural productions. . . This book is thoroughly researched and argued. It will be essential for readers of modernist African American literature, visual culture studies, and American studies.” * Kimberly Juanita Brown, Dartmouth College *
“The boldness and brilliance of The Matter of Black Living lies in its innovative vision and its exhilarating methodological practices which ultimately widen and deepen the story of pre-Harlem Renaissance black life. The profundity of Womack’s archival research and the eloquence of her cultural analyses illuminate the intricacies of the efforts in which black peoples repeatedly undisciplined the racial data chronically weaponized against them. In doing so, they mobilized new technologies to articulate the capaciousness and incessant vitality of blackness itself.” * Daphne A. Brooks, Yale University *
“Womack has penned a highly original and revelatory book. . . . A tour de force that reconceptualizes the documentation of black life: the creative interventions and experiments in the longue durée of black disfranchisement and precarity.” * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
"Womack provocatively argues for understanding the self-representation of Black communities as a form of resistance to the reductive understanding of African American existence as a problem. . . Building on W. E. B. Du Bois's insights about how Black Americans were forced to split themselves into a living self that could celebrate the complexity of their communities and their struggles and the representations of themselves seen through white eyes, Womack considers three forms of self-representation embraced by leading Black thinkers in the early 20th century: the social survey, photography, and film." * Choice *
"Autumn Womack has authored a text that impels the reader to embrace the aesthetic and technological intersections between Black life and the data that social scientists hoped would represent it." * Technology and Culture *
"The Matter of Black Living is a stunning book, a noteworthy contribution to the study of postbellum African American literature. Just as the Black artists at the heart of Womack’s book have 'made data move,' so has Womack enlivened the apparently cold, static, and empirical forms of data science in order to break open the story of how those artists found life in them." -- Nadia Nurhussein * Genre *
"Through its stunning archival recoveries, its enlivening of turn-of-the-century black aesthetic and epistemological experiments, and its radical un-disciplining of visual and literary studies, The Matter of Black Living offers an urgent reconsideration of how and why we continue to reach for data to index ongoing realities of white supremacy, antiblack violence, and racialized genocide. Looking back to look forward, and giving us new and critically important ways to read the forms and practices of the reform era, Womack offers an approach to racial data that is fundamentally ambivalent, unsettled, and searching—in other words, full of life." * Modernism/modernity *