Black Bodies That Matter: Mourning, Rage, and Beauty

by James Garrison

Overview

Responding to interconnected tragedies affecting minority populations in America, Black Bodies That Matter: Mourning, Rage, and Beauty brings together the Black Lives Matter movement with the framework developed by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter.

Butler’s analysis of subject life as a kind of melancholy—preempted mourning where loss itself is lost—and her advocacy of public forms of grieving like the AIDS Quilt, which brings lost lives out of the shadows, highlight the problematic connection between memory and loss when it comes to subjects who do not fully matter as they should. Taking her remarks on public memorials like the AIDS Quilt, her reading of Michel Foucault’s idea of the subject as a self-surveilling prisoner, and her examination of Louis Althusser’s scene where the voice of police authority bellows “Hey, you there!” and creates the “you” that turns around beholden to conscience, James Garrison examines resonances with black experience in America, which itself is marked by violence, surveillance, imprisonment, and encounters with the ominous voice of police authority. Investigating a wide array of black cultural expression, Black Bodies That Matter brings new insight to how mourning, vulnerability and invulnerability, rage, and beauty connect to human dignity and the depth and breadth of black loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793644695
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	10/04/2024
Series:	Philosophy of Race
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324

About the Author

James Garrison is assistant professor of philosophy at Baldwin Wallace University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements (Which Are Part of the Book’s Message and Not to Be Skipped)

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Mourning (and Black Melancholy)

Chapter 2 – Vulnerability and Invulnerability

Chapter 3 – Rage

Chapter 4 – Beauty

Bibliography

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

James Garrison's reckoning with the existential dimensions of Black loss becomes our own reckoning with the American legacy of racial violence that, one way or another, has shaped us all. In Black Bodies That Matter: Mourning, Rage, and Beauty, a candid narrative that ranges from police violence to Black melancholy, from Kant's aesthetics to Star Trek's first Black captain, from the art of Kara Walker to the comedy of Key and Peele, Garrison develops a theory of beauty as integral to processes of grief and rage that speaks to the creative joys of Black life today.”

Leah Kalmanson

"This remarkable book engages a world in which Black humanity is consistently ignored. With philosophical depth and an accessible language, it exposes the layers of precarity in Black life and illuminates the civic and philosophical significance of Black melancholia, anger, and critical consciousness. It is also a rarity in philosophy: The ideas are presented with great sophistication but also with a conversational structure, and its voice is searing yet vulnerable—all of which make this work a compelling page-turner. A genuine achievement and a must read!"

David H. Kim

"In Black Bodies That Matter, James Garrison makes it personal. In the specificity of this hugely intelligent and compelling cultural narration, Garrison weighs in against the inertia of a normative statement of fact—Black lives matter—by serving up a scathing indictment of a sleeping world that will not even say their names. The enormity of the crimes against what is our shared humanity is given weight and substance by the seemingly invincible absence of any meaningful response to the wanton injustices perpetrated against some of us. Institutionalized deafness and its unwavering commitment to saying and doing absolutely nothing escalates a weary, melancholic yet still righteous anger into a primal scream against what has always been a dead end. Garrison's story of his search for an activist and useful rage—a good, beautiful rage—is one that everyone needs to hear."

Roger T. Ames