Shortlisted, 2024 MLA Prize Prize for a First Book, given by the Modern Language Association Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racistdominationFor Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United Statesby creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure isfundamental to the production and circulation of racial meaning in the United States through a study ofexperimental work by authors and artists of color.For Pleasure offers methods for reading experimental literature and art produced by racially minoritizedauthors and artists working in and around the US, including Isaac Julien, Nella Larsen, Yoko Ono, JackWhitten, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Zora Neale Hurston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Cici Wu. Along theway, we learn what a racist joke has to do with the history of monochrome painting, if beauty has a partto play in social change, and whether whimsy should be taken seriously as a political affect. Carrolldraws attention to key connections between aesthetic pleasure and experimentation through theirshared capacity for world-building. Neither aesthetic pleasure nor experimental forms are liberatory inand of themselves; however, both can interrupt, defamiliarize, and rearrange our habits of aestheticjudgment.
