PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

For Pleasure

Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics

Rachel Jane Carroll

$68.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
New York University Press
12 December 2023
Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racist

domination

For Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States

by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is

fundamental to the production and circulation of racial meaning in the United States through a study of

experimental work by authors and artists of color.

For Pleasure offers methods for reading experimental literature and art produced by racially minoritized

authors and artists working in and around the US, including Isaac Julien, Nella Larsen, Yoko Ono, Jack

Whitten, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Zora Neale Hurston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Cici Wu. Along the

way, we learn what a racist joke has to do with the history of monochrome painting, if beauty has a part

to play in social change, and whether whimsy should be taken seriously as a political affect. Carroll

draws attention to key connections between aesthetic pleasure and experimentation through their

shared capacity for world-building. Neither aesthetic pleasure nor experimental forms are liberatory in

and of themselves; however, both can interrupt, defamiliarize, and rearrange our habits of aesthetic

judgment.

By:  
Imprint:   New York University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm, 
Weight:   490g
ISBN:   9781479826735
ISBN 10:   1479826731
Series:   Minoritarian Aesthetics
Pages:   288
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Rachel Jane Carroll is the ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Reviews for For Pleasure: Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics

In a world where the category of race too easily conjures up the ugliest aspects of social inequality, xenophobia, and racial violence, Rachel Carroll’s exquisite new book reminds us that racial difference can also be a site of extraordinary beauty, imagination, and communion. Through a meticulous and generous reading of twentieth-century experimental cultural forms, For Pleasure recovers a tradition of Black and Asian American artists refiguring race as an open invitation to ceaselessly play with and recombine the various facets of phenotypical difference. The artists Carroll assembles ultimately aim to wholly disorganize our sense of what counts as beautiful, opening up the field of pleasure to continual revision. -- Ramzi Fawaz, author of Queer Forms Thrilling and inventive at every turn. Carroll seeks to recover aesthetic and erotic pleasure in literary, visual, and performative art, and she does so in unexpected ways and places. In arguing that aesthetic pleasure and innovation can undo the unfreedom of racism in which we find ourselves, this well-argued and stylistically sophisticated book reveals experimental art to be an undeniable vehicle of social theory. -- GerShun Avilez, University of Maryland


See Inside

See Also