The Dark Delight of Being Strange

Black Stories of Freedom

James B. Haile III, Ytasha L. Womack

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
24 December 2024

Literary studies: general; Philosophy: aesthetics

An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life.

In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown's famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial ""hollow earth theory"" from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison.

Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

By: James B. Haile III
Foreword by: Ytasha L. Womack
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780231216296
ISBN 10: 0231216297
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 24 December 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments Preface: P.S.A. Part I: Of the Door of No Return to the Stars 1. Henry Box Brown: An Ode to the Enigma of Black Freedom 2. At Rest: Journey to the Center of the Earth 3. Dumas: This Land of Mine Part II: On the Transformation of the Spirit 4. Theft 5. Tathāgata 6. Appetite/Fever/Consumption Epilogue: Nero—Toward a More Perfect Union Notes Index

James B. Haile, III is an Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist writer who is an associate professor of philosophy with a joint appointment in English at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring the Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present (2020).

Reviews for The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom

This book is a true trickster, changing forms every few pages, and doing so with deep intellectual certitude and winking hilarity. It’s a mediation on blackness that takes on the ever-changing formlessness of blackness. Now that I have read The Dark Delight of Being Strange, I’m looking forward to reading it again. -- Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a thought-provoking, creative meditation on black freedom. Not only does James Haile III explore the ""what if"" of the speculative imagination, he also situates his reflections in the time-honored space where philosophy and storytelling meet. The result is a gift for all readers. -- Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage This book is a kaleidoscopic fever dream of thinking and creativity, of analytical experiment and diligence. Using stories as case studies, Haile meditates on the illogic of blackness’s constitutive ironies. It is a meditation—a mediation—that tethers together philosophy and art, magic and physics, memoir and manifesto and prayer. It is a black male song cycle, a dark delight indeed. -- Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being