The Trouble with Post-Blackness

The Trouble with Post-Blackness

Edited by: Houston Baker Jr. and K. Merinda Simmons

Columbia University Press | 2015

https://doi.org/10.7312/bake16934

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About this book

This collection of original essays confronts the premise, advanced by black intellectuals, that the Obama administration marked the start of a "post-racial" era in the United States. While the "transcendent" and post-racial black elite declare victory over America's longstanding codes of racial exclusion and racist violence, their evidence relies largely on their own salaries and celebrity. These essays strike at the certainty of those who insist life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now independent of skin color and race in America.

Scholars, novelists, poets, and journalists revisit the idea of “blackness” and whether it is a concept we can--or should--move beyond.

Author information

Houston A. Baker is Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University and a scholar of African American literature and culture. He is a member of the pioneering generation of the 1960s that sought to expand the canons and definitions of the humanities in the academy. He served as director of Afro-American studies and founded and directed the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. His book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era received an American Book Award.

K. Merinda Simmons is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama. She is author of Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora and coeditor, with Maha Marouan, of Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Displacement in the Twenty-First Century. Her areas of research and publication combine literary, religious, and Southern studies, with critical emphases on theories of gender and race.

Reviews

An excellent collection of essays from impressive minds responding openly to what black identity was, is, and perhaps will be.... Anyone with an expressed interest in racial history and identity will enjoy this read.

This thoughtful, provocative, and only occasionally heavy-going collection of essays persuasively argues that what Touré calls 'being like Barack' really just maintains normative whiteness as an untroubled, unanalyzed construct.

A thoughtful, if not gentle, scholarly refutation of a controversial claim of a post-racial society.

George Yancy, Duquesne University, author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race:
The Trouble with Post-Blackness courageously puts to rest the dangerous, delusory, and fabulous (as in 'fable') claim that we inhabit a post-racial America. Through these critically engaging essays, the concept of 'post-blackness' is indeed troubled, rendered turbid and untenable in an America in which black people continue to face ontological occlusion and existential foreclosure. This text refuses mythopoetic slogans and faddish signifiers, instead ethically grounding us in the temporal now and refusing to mock those black bodies that face an anti-black America that continues to mark them as dangerous, criminal, and existentially nugatory.

George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:
An excellent collection and a timely intervention in a conversation with important ramifications for scholarship and civic life. There is both breadth and depth in these pieces, and a pleasing and engaging diversity of concerns and writing styles.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
Contents Free access PDF PDF	v
Acknowledgments Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	vii
Introduction: The Dubious Stage of Post-Blackness— Performing Otherness, Conserving Dominance K. Merinda Simmons Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
1. “What Was Is”: The Time and Space of Entanglement Erased by Post-Blackness Margo Natalie Crawford Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	21
2. Black Literary Writers and Post-Blackness Stephanie Li Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	44
3. African Diasporic Blackness Out of Line: Trouble for “Post-Black” African Americanism Greg Thomas Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	60
4. Fear of a Performative Planet: Troubling the Concept of “Post-Blackness” Rone Shavers Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	81
5. E-Raced: #Touré, Twitter, and Trayvon Riché Richardson Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	93
6. Post-Blackness and All of the Black Americas Heather D. Russell Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	110
7. Embodying Africa: Roots-Seekers and the Politics of Blackness Bayo Holsey Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	144
8. “The world is a ghetto”: Post-Racial America(s) and the Apocalypse Patrice Rankine Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	162
9. The Long Road Home Erin Aubry Kaplan Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	188
10. Half as Good John L. Jackson Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	194
11. “Whither Now and Why”: Content Mastery and Pedagogy— A Critique and a Challenge Dana A. Williams Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	209
12. Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency Ishmael Reed Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	220
13. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Post-Blackness (after Wallace Stevens) Emily Raboteau Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	243
Conclusion: Why the Lega Mask Has Many Mouths and Multiple Eyes Houston A. Baker Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	247
List of Contributors Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	257
Index Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	263

The Trouble with Post-Blackness

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