The Racial Unfamiliar
Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:30th Aug '22
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility.
John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.
Using the concept of “critical Blackness” to signal a deconstructive sensibility, Brooks shows how a set of artists defy conventions and preconceptions about how to see Blackness, and how to think of artistic genres and aesthetic traditions about Black literature and race more generally. Brooks makes us “hear” photography and see how a novel can “sound” like bebop to show how the strategic illegibility produced by critical Blackness is not only conceptual but also sensorial. The Racial Unfamiliar prompts us to explore how the senses might be re-educated to reject racial normative ways of perceiving Blackness. -- Glenda Carpio, author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery
John Brooks’ The Racial Unfamiliar elegantly describes a cohort of contemporary Black artists whose abstractionist aesthetics unfix race from essentialized representation, privileging instead disorientation and illegibility. This is groundbreaking work that cogently articulates a critical Blackness that is not about countering stereotypes, but rather the power of illegibility to unmake race. -- Sheri-Marie Harrison, author of Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism
In The Racial Unfamiliar, John Brooks makes a compelling case for "critical Blackness" as a term for appreciating the conceptual pressure artists put on blackness, as an idea, in their representational experiments. Deftly, aptly, beautifully, Brooks showcases a fluency across visual art, sound, and literature as he advances his argument about an aesthetics of abstraction and illegibility. His close readings are brilliant and inspiring and the result, this essential book, amplifies criticality as a defining dynamic of contemporary Black expressive traditions. -- Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
John Brooks joins the vanguard of scholars chronicling Black expressive culture. Spotlighting the ‘abstractionist aesthetics’ of artists such as Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker, he dynamically enters the debate on what Blackness is and ain’t by forcefully rejecting essentialism in favor of the opaque, illegible, and variable. -- Harvey Young, author of Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body
ISBN: 9780231205023
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages