Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coatesās case for reparations to Toni Morrisonās revolutionary humanism to DāAngeloās simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthyās bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, āsomething was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.ā Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis.
McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones. In āNotes on Trap,ā he borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to reveal the social and political significance of trap music, the drug-soaked strain of Southern hip-hop that, as he puts it, is āthe funeral music that the Reagan Revolution deserves.ā In āBack in the Day,ā McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s. In āThe Masterās Tools,ā the relationship between Spanish painter Diego VelĆ”zquez and his acolyte-slave, Juan de Pareja, becomes the lens through which Kehinde Wileyās paintings are viewed, while āTo Make a Poet Blackā explores the hidden blackness of Sappho and the erotic power of Phillis Wheatley. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead survey the state of black letters. In his title essay, McCarthy takes on the question of reparations, arguing that true progress will not come until Americans remake their institutions in the service of true equality. As he asks, āWhat can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes?ā
For readers of Teju Coleās Known and Strange Things and Mark Greifās Against Everything, McCarthyās essays portray a brilliant young critic at work, making sense of our disjointed times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art, identity and representation.
This book title, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (Essays), ISBN: 9781631496486, by Jesse McCarthy, published by Liveright (March 9, 2021) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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