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Haunted Life

Haunted Life

Visual Culture and Black Modernity

by David Marriott

Published by: Rutgers University Press

Imprint: Rutgers University Press

293 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 × 20.00 mm, 8

Paperback
9780813540283
Published: March 2007

£29.99

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

In Haunted Life, David Marriott examines the complex interplay between racial fears and anxieties and the political-visual cultures of suspicion and state terror. He compels readers to consider how media technologies are "haunted" by the phantom of racial slavery. Through examples from film and television, modernist literature, and philosophy, he shows how the ideological image of a brutal African past is endlessly recycled and how this perpetuation of historical catastrophe stokes our nation's race-conscious paranoia.

Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and filmmakers, including John Edgar Wideman, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Issac Julien, Alain Locke, and Sidney Poitier, Haunted Life is a bold and original exploration of the legacies of black visual culture and the political, deeply sexualized violence that lies buried beneath it.

Spooks : Wideman's catastrophe
That within
"The derived life of fiction" : race, childhood, and culture
Black narcissus : Isaac Julien
Letters to Langston
The love of neither-either : racial integration in Pressure point
Bonding over phobia
Afterword: ice cold

David Marriott is an associate professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Incognegro and On Black Men.

This volume is an elegantly written, ethically grounded, and intelligently observed series of meditations of relations that have been produced by the traumatic legacies of slavery around the Black Atlantic world.
- Jacqueline Goldsby (Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago)