Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?

Essays

Jesse McCarthy (Harvard University)

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Hardback

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English

Liveright Publishing Corporation
30 April 2021

The Arts: General & Reference; Literary essays; Literature: history & criticism; Social & cultural history; Ethnic studies

"Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates's case for reparations to Toni Morrison's revolutionary humanism to D'Angelo's simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy's 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, ""something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making."" 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 ""Notes on Trap,"" 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 ""the funeral music that the Reagan Revolution deserves."" In ""Back in the Day,"" McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s. In ""The Master's Tools,"" the relationship between Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and his acolyte-slave, Juan de Pareja, becomes the lens through which Kehinde Wiley's paintings are viewed, while ""To Make a Poet Black"" 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, ""What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes?""

For readers of Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things and Mark Greif's Against Everything, McCarthy's 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."

By: Jesse McCarthy (Harvard University)
Imprint: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 239mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 589g
ISBN: 9781631496486
ISBN 10: 1631496484
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 30 April 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published articles and reviews in the journals transposition, NOVEL, and African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Ralph Ellison in Context (forthcoming) as well as a new introduction for Vincent O. Carter’s long out-of-print memoir The Bern Book (Dalkey Archive, 2020). He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? a collection of essays (Liveright, 2021) and a novel, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).

Reviews for Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays

Having grown up in Paris, where he moved with his parents, both journalists, when he was 8, the author bears witness to 'the Paris of color, of difference' that marginalizes Black immigrants. The tragic terrorist attacks at Bataclan in 2015, writes McCarthy, communicated 'a desperate will to power' by those who believe verbal expression impossible. Urbane, penetrating cultural analysis.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review This is a very smart and soulful book. Jesse McCarthy is a terrific essayist.--Zadie Smith