About the Book
“For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it”–
Book Synopsis
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.
Review Quotes
“
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
About the Author
Rachel Jane Carroll is the ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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