 | The Trouble with Post-Blackness Subjects: African Americans -- Race identity; African Americans -- Intellectual life; African Americans -- Social conditions -- 1975–; Social change -- United States; Identity politics -- United States; Post-racialism -- United States; African American philosophy; ; The contributors to this thoughtful, provocative, and only occasionally heavy-going collection of essays argue that the idea that the modern-day U.S. is post-racial, specifically in black-white relations, does a disservice to both historical and present-day racial realities. Barack Obama's presidency sets the general context for these pieces, and the title takes its inspiration from social critic Touré's 2011 treatise Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?, which proposed that what it means for an American to be black is no longer as fixed as it once was. Touré also appears as a touchstone throughout the pieces, which touch on aspects of black culture and life that the authors consider imperiled by the post-blackness concept. The opening selection from Margo Natalie Crawford, for instance, looks at the Black Arts movement, while Greg Thomas considers African-American literature, and Bayo Holsey examines an "imagined Africa as an ancestral homeland." Despite such disparate concerns, the authors are linked by the conviction that post-blackness doesn't just try to extract its subjects from the past; it also ignores or actively denies the ways in which the present is still dangerous for the majority of "blackened subjects." While the academic tone and intellectual rigor are unlikely to inspire any significant public debate, this book persuasively argues that what Touré calls "being like Barack" really just maintains normative whiteness as an untroubled, unanalyzed construct. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. 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. |
