Description
Book SynopsisHONORABLE MENTION, HARRY SHAW AND KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WORK IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES, GIVEN BY THE POP CULTURE ASSOCIATIONA view of transatlantic slavery's afterlife and modern Blackness through the lens of ageAlthough more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggressionparticularly against Black children concern the victim appearing as a threat. But why and how is the perceived appearance of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how th
Trade Review"This truly revelatory book uncovers the
flesh of black age. Through a focus on black untimeliness, Habiba Ibrahim reveals a counter-history of modernity. Ibrahim adds vital new dimensions to the study of blackness as an alternative relation to time. This tremendous book reveals that black life is a state of being alienated from the time of one’s own body and a radical refusal of patriarchal adulthood." * Margo Natalie Crawford, author of
Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *
"Habiba Ibrahim’s
Black Age opens up powerful new vocabularies and paradigms for thinking about Black cultural expression—and indeed Black life. Through beautifully argued analyses of literary texts, Ibrahim produces startling and profound insights into age, temporality, modernity, race, subjectivity, and the very category of the human." * Gayle Wald, author of
It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television *
"Ibrahim’s dialectic of exclusion and reclamation advances an alternative way to discern the relationship between the past and the present...
Black Age points us to new ways of thinking and interpreting what time it is." -- ALH Online Review * American Literary History Online Review *
