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JOHN BROOKS

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Studies
Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts
The Ohio State University

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THE RACIAL UNFAMILIAR:

ILLEGIBILITY IN BLACK LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The works of Black authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or "the Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility.

In this book, I examine a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. I argue that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, I pinpoint a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. I contend that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand Black cultural production.

SCHOLAR / WRITER / EDUCATOR

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. Previously, I taught at Boston College and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. My research and teaching interests include Black creative expression from the 19th century to the present, radical and experimental aesthetics, performance studies, and the poetics of the Afrofuture.

 

I am the author of The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, Literature Now series, 2022). My published articles include an essay in PMLA about the musicality of Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, and an essay in African American Review on Black Feminist Poetics in Robin Coste Lewis’s poetry collection, The Voyage of the Sable Venus. I also published an article on the radical rhetorical strategies of Frederick Douglass's autobiographies in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, as well as short pieces titled "Monumental Fugitivity: The Aesthetics of #BlackLivesMatter Defacement" (Critical Inquiry's online blog, "In the Moment") and "How Should We Approach Black Literature and Art Now?" (Columbia University Press online blog).

Between my time at the Ohio State University, Boston College, Emory University, Indiana University, and the University of South Carolina, I have over ten years of experience teaching courses in Africana studies, African American literature and visual-art, American literature, fiction, introductory composition, remedial composition, professional and technical communication, and rhetoric.

ARTICLE AND CHAPTER PUBLICATIONS

EXERCISES IN JOYFUL IMPROVISATIONAL PRACTICE

Co-edited with Jonathan Leal. Special Issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 9, no. 1 (Forthcoming Spring 2025).

EDGEWORK AND EXCESS: JIMI HENDRIX, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF FUZZ, AND THE REHEARSAL OF BLACK LIBERATION

American Quarterly. (Forthcoming June 2024).

SATIRIZING SATIRE ITSELF: ATLANTA'S APPROPRIATION AESTHETIC AND THE BLACKENING OF US CIVIL SOCIETY

Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama. Ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. University Press of Mississippi (Forthcoming).

Columbia University Press blog. 24 October 2022. 1,735 words.

WHAT'S ON FITZGERALD'S BOOKCASE? REREADING "THE JELLY-BEAN"

The Romance of Regionalism in the Works of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise. Ed. Kirk Curnutt and Sara A. Kosiba (Lexington Books, 2022).

"In the Moment" (Critical Inquiry blog). 14 July 2021. 2,194 words.

SANDY’S ROOT, DOUGLASS’S MÊTIS: "BLACK ART" AND THE CRAFT OF RESISTANCE IN THE SLAVE NARRATIVES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 9, no. 1 (2021): 185-205.

ANTIESSENTIALIST FORM: THE BEBOP EFFECT OF PERCIVAL EVERETT’S ERASURE

PMLA 134, no. 5 (2019): 1042-1055.

THE HERETICAL HISTORY OF ROBIN COSTE LEWIS’S THE VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS

African American Review 52, no. 3 (2019): 239-253.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE: LITERATURE & CULTURE

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

African American Theatre History
Literature and Ethnicity
American Icons
Criticizing Television

BOSTON COLLEGE

Boundaries of Belonging: Race and Antiessentialist Art
Encountering Inequalities: Disparity and Protest Art
Literature, Testimony, Justice
Understanding and Protecting Our Oceans in the Wake of Climate Change
Planet in Peril: The History and Future of Human Impacts on the Planet

EMORY UNIVERSITY

Confusing Sense: Disorientation in African American Literature and Art

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Introduction to Fiction: "Social Boundaries"
Introduction to Fiction: "Alienation"
Introduction to the Advanced Study of Literature: "Nightlife"

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Themes in American Writing: "American Cyborgs"
Fiction

TEACHING EXPERIENCE: COMPOSITION

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Basic Writing
Introduction to Colege Composition
Technical and Professional Communication
Elementary Composition

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Rhetoric and Composition
Critical Reading and Composition

CONTACT

Hagerty Hall 473
1775 College Road South
Columbus, OH 43210

(231) 437-0958

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