Description
Book SynopsisJohn 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.
Trade ReviewUsing 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 SlaveryJohn 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 CriticismIn
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 BeingJohn 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 BodyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Encountering Illegibility: The Enactment of Critical Blackness
Part I. Vision1. Picturing Blackness in the Photography of Roy DeCarava
2. A Muse for Blackness: Kara Walker’s “Outlaw Rebel” Vision
Part II. Genre3. Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett’s
Erasure4. Beyond Satire: The Humor of Incongruity in Paul Beatty’s
The SelloutPart III. History5. The Politics of Inertia: Temporal Distortion in Suzan-Lori Parks’s
100 Plays for the First Hundred Days6. Heretical Poetics in Robin Coste Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Sable VenusAfterword: Critical Blackness in Contexts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
