Details

ISBN-10: 022680691X
ISBN-13: 9780226806914
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 04/01/2022
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H

The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930

Paperback

Price: $27.50

Overview

Examining how turn-of-the-century Black cultural producers’ experiments with new technologies of racial data produced experimental aesthetics.

As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a “racial data revolution,” one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.

The Matter of Black Living excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.

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Reviews
"With new historical insight and indispensable analysis of the social survey, the photograph, and the motion picture, Autumn Womack calls for an urgent rethinking of the information technologies, data regimes and disciplinary measures employed to enumerate black social life. From reading Zora Neal Hurston's filmic practices through an aesthetic of overexposure to conceptualizing "looking out" as a capacious mode of perception and praxis, The Matter of Black Living reveals the ruptures and possibilities of black creative innovation. A brilliant read."– "Simone Browne, University of Texas at Austin"
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Details

ISBN-10: 022680691X
ISBN-13: 9780226806914
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 04/01/2022
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H
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