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Unexplained Presence

Margo Jefferson author Tisa Bryant author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Wave Books

Published:17th Oct '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Unexplained Presence cover

***Now with a new afterword by MARGO JEFFERSON***

In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mis-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's Darling, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, giving voice to characters whom have otherwise been structurally silenced. As Pulitzer–prize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved.

“For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media—characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or François Ozon's 8 Femmes —but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings.”—Publishers Weekly

“Bryant’s essay title also captures the way ‘radical writing’ (not ‘just’ writing) seems to have become, for some poets, a synonym primarily for poetry, eliding a great deal of radical drama, nonfiction, and fiction, to say nothing of cross-genre prose.” —Jacket2

 “What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.” San Francisco Bay Guardian

  • Short-listed for LAMBDA 2010 (United States)

ISBN: 9798891060050

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

200 pages