Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality

The Farce this Time

Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040398791
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Social Sciences

These historically grounded essays by Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren incorporate essential historical, contemporary, and literary perspectives on Black cultural criticism to explore the full portrait of racial injustice and inequality in America.

Taking up such topics as the evolving politics of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina and novels by Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead, this book engages with the Black Radical Tradition, Afropessimism, antiblackness, race reductionism, and other key theories and concepts in contemporary Black studies. Challenging the prevailing assertion that longstanding white animus against nonwhite peoples sufficiently and adequately explains deepening injustice, past injustice or present inequality, the essays argue that such thinking fails to fully explain America's past and leaves us ill-equipped to handle the continuing challenges in the present.

Tracing black cultural criticism across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, this book will appeal to students, scholars and researchers of Black studies, race and ethnic studies, and contemporary and black American literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Race Reductionism as Class Mythology: From the Solid South to Neoliberal Antiracism
• 2 Black Politics in New Orleans, Pre- and Post-Katrina: A Case in the Mutual Constitution of Antiracism and Neoliberalism1
• 3 William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and the Rehabilitation of Race Relations
• 4 From Frederick Douglass to Colson Whitehead : Slavery and the Politics of African American Literature1
• Coda: You Can’t Get There from Here
• Index