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.

Using 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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Encountering Illegibility: The Enactment of Critical BlacknessPart I. Vision1. Picturing Blackness in the Photography of Roy DeCarava2. A Muse for Blackness: Kara Walker’s “Outlaw Rebel” VisionPart 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 ContextsNotesBibliographyIndex

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.

Using 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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Encountering Illegibility: The Enactment of Critical BlacknessPart I. Vision1. Picturing Blackness in the Photography of Roy DeCarava2. A Muse for Blackness: Kara Walker’s “Outlaw Rebel” VisionPart 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 ContextsNotesBibliographyIndex

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.

Using 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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Encountering Illegibility: The Enactment of Critical BlacknessPart I. Vision1. Picturing Blackness in the Photography of Roy DeCarava2. A Muse for Blackness: Kara Walker’s “Outlaw Rebel” VisionPart 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 ContextsNotesBibliographyIndex