Trouble with Post-Blackness

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.

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. -- George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness 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 Yancy, Duquesne University, author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race A thoughtful, if not gentle, scholarly refutation of a controversial claim of a post-racial society. Kirkus Reviews This thoughtful, provocative, and only occasionally heavy-going collection of essays... persuasively argues that what Toure calls 'being like Barack' really just maintains normative whiteness as an untroubled, unanalyzed construct. Publishers Weekly 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. Library Journal

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dubious Stage of Post-Blackness-Performing Otherness, Conserving Dominance, by K. Merinda Simmons 1. What Was Is: The Time and Space of Entanglement Erased by Post-Blackness, by Margo Natalie Crawford 2. Black Literary Writers and Post-Blackness, by Stephanie Li 3. African Diasporic Blackness Out of Line: Trouble for "Post-Black" African Americanism, by Greg Thomas 4. Fear of a Performative Planet: Troubling the Concept of "Post-Blackness", by Rone Shavers 5. E-Raced: #Toure, Twitter, and Trayvon, by Riche Richardson 6. Post-Blackness and All of the Black Americas, by Heather D. Russell 7. Embodying Africa: Roots-Seekers and the Politics of Blackness, by Bayo Holsey 8. "The world is a ghetto": Post-Racial America(s) and the Apocalypse, by Patrice Rankine 9. The Long Road Home, by Erin Aubry Kaplan 10. Half as Good, by John L. Jackson Jr. 11. "Whither Now and Why": Content Mastery and Pedagogy-a Critique and a Challenge, by Dana A. Williams 12. Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency, by Ishmael Reed 13. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Post-Blackness (after Wallace Stevens), by Emily Raboteau Conclusion: Why the Lega Mask Has Many Mouths and Multiple Eyes, by Houston A. Baker Jr. List of Contributors Index