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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Shades of Black
One might say that the womb of death--the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonization--gave birth to Black populations. Taking this observation as her point of departure, Nathalie Etoke examines Black existence today in her riveting new book, Shades of Black. In a white supremacist world, Black bodies hold a specific position, invested with a range of meaning that maintains them in a fixed role, with a script they did not write. The white world has invented and defined the Black person according to its own interests, endowing her with a bereaved humanity. The Black person is confronted with an essential paradox--exist as Black or as a human being? Does the Black person exist for herself or for the other? In the white world, is the Black race the embodiment of a sub-humanity?
Situated at the crossroads of three countries--Cameroon, France, and, now, the United States--Nathalie Etoke is uniquely positioned for this polyphonic reflection on race. She examines what happens when race obliterates historical, social, cultural, and political differences among populations of African descent from different parts of the world. Focusing on recent and ongoing topics in the United States, including the murder of George Floyd, police brutality, the complex symbolism of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, Etoke explores the relations of violence, oppression, dispossession, and inequalities that have brought us here, face to face with these existential questions: Are you breathing? Are we breathing?
Book Details
- Publisher: Seagull Books
- Publish Date: Apr 20th, 2021
- Pages: 144
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.20in - 0.80in - 0.84lb
- EAN: 9780857428530
- Categories: • Black Studies (Global)• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - African American & Bl
About the Author
Etoke, Nathalie: - Nathalie Etoke is associate professor of Francophone and Africana studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition.
Walker, Gila: - Gila Walker is the translator of more than a hundred works in French, including texts by Jacques Derrida, François Jullien, and Tzvetan Todorov. She divides her time between her homes in New York and the southwest of France.
Praise for this book
"Etoke's Cameroonian, French, and US background provides her with interesting and insightful perspectives to study the African diaspora and the 'capitalist behemoth's' role in helping shape and sustain today's race relations. Etoke examines white/Black relations, the nativist perceptions of ADOS (American descendants of slavery) and their interactions with Black immigrants from the Caribbean (descendants of slavery but excluded from ADOS) and sub-Saharan Africa, and the social and economic disparities within the non-ADOS population. This divisiveness is contrary to the pan-African liberation dream of W. E. B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, and others. The exceptional ADOS individuals who achieve visibility and acceptability are those who serve as 'fetishes of diversity'; Etoke writes that they cannot transform the system because they are part of it, rather acting like fig leaves hiding systemic racism. This charade is produced by the 'diversity industry' in addition to slave tourism, 'racist antiracism, ' and other activities and ideologies that support white American masculinity (MAGA's 'color of nostalgia' is white). Adeptly translated from Etoke's French by Walker, this is an important reflection on the role of race, gender, and nationality in US society, politics, and culture. . . .Recommended."-- "Choice"