Racial Unfamiliar - Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture

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.

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Encountering Illegibility: The Enactment of Critical Blackness
Part I. Vision
1. Picturing Blackness in the Photography of Roy DeCarava
2. A Muse for Blackness: Kara Walker’s “Outlaw Rebel” Vision
Part II. Genre
3. Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett’s Erasure
4. Beyond Satire: The Humor of Incongruity in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout
Part III. History
5. The Politics of Inertia: Temporal Distortion in Suzan-Lori Parks’s 100 Plays for the First Hundred Days
6. Heretical Poetics in Robin Coste Lewis’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus
Afterword: Critical Blackness in Contexts
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

John Brooks is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University.

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: John Brooks, Brooks John
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2022
• EAN: 9780231205023
• ISBN: 978-0-231-20502-3
• No. of pages: 304
• Series: Literature Now
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Education; Education, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, ART / American / African American & Black, Literary Criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American & Black