Masks : Blackness, Race and the Imagination

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MASKS is an archaeology of the racial imagination, exploring the work of both black and white artists and writers. It shows how the racist belief in innate intellectual and moral difference developed from the classificatory sciences of the Enlightenment. It also questions the more opaque racism of integration, where professed ideas of 'equal' so often mean 'like us'. Lively places these two tendencies against an 'existential' definition of blackness, which has come mostly from black writers themselves. In his penetrating study, Adam Lively looks closely at eighteenth century novels, jazz and rap, propagandist verse, the trickster tales of slaves and their autobiographical narratives, the science of Darwin and fictions of blood and empire. Examining the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the effects of black feminism, he argues that only by understanding the complex evolution of present attitudes can we understand the impact of race on our imaginations, and on our lives.