Hope Draped in Black
Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress
Hope Draped in Black
Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress
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Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822361534
Number of Pages: 316
Published: 10/06/2016
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm
In Hope Draped in Black Joseph R. Winters responds to the enduring belief that America follows a constant trajectory of racial progress. Such notions-like those that suggested the passage into a postracial era following Barack Obama's election-gloss over the history of racial violence and oppression to create an imaginary and self-congratulatory world where painful memories are conveniently forgotten. In place of these narratives, Winters advocates for an idea of hope that is predicated on a continuous engagement with loss and melancholy. Signaling a heightened sensitivity to the suffering of others, melancholy disconcerts us and allows us to cut against dominant narratives and identities. Winters identifies a black literary and aesthetic tradition in the work of intellectuals, writers, and artists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Charles Burnett that often underscores melancholy, remembrance, loss, and tragedy in ways that gesture toward such a conception of hope. Winters also draws on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to highlight how remembering and mourning the uncomfortable dimensions of American social life can provide alternate sources for hope and imagination that might lead to building a better world.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Unreconciled Strivings: Du Bois, the Seduction of Optimism, and the Legacy of Sorrow 31
2. Unhopeful but Not Hopeless: Melancholic Interpretations of Progress and Freedom 57
3. Hearing the Breaks and Cuts of History: Ellison, Morrison, and the Uses of Literary Jazz 85
4. Reel Progress: Race, Film, and Cinematic Melancholy 137
5. Figures of the Postracial: Race, Nation, and Violence in the Age of Obama and Morrison 187
Conclusion 237
Notes 253
Select Bibliography 287
Index 297
Introduction 1
1. Unreconciled Strivings: Du Bois, the Seduction of Optimism, and the Legacy of Sorrow 31
2. Unhopeful but Not Hopeless: Melancholic Interpretations of Progress and Freedom 57
3. Hearing the Breaks and Cuts of History: Ellison, Morrison, and the Uses of Literary Jazz 85
4. Reel Progress: Race, Film, and Cinematic Melancholy 137
5. Figures of the Postracial: Race, Nation, and Violence in the Age of Obama and Morrison 187
Conclusion 237
Notes 253
Select Bibliography 287
Index 297
"In lucid prose and with a fluid grasp of diverse cultural text ... Winters demonstrates how a central strain of the black cultural tradition has been to disrupt the narrative of progress.... Against historians who simply cast racial progress as historically inaccurate and posit more cyclical theories of history (that the past recurs in unexpected ways), Winters powerfully contends that progress-talk helps keep injustice in place, creating the justification for collective moral apathy toward racial violence and a disregard for radical racial disparities-all in the name of their eventual eradication." -- Alex Zamalin * Political Theory * "Groundbreaking. . . . Sure to be referenced by scholars for many years to come." -- Chante Baker Martin * Journal of Southern History * "The power of Hope Draped in Black is its reenergizing of the critiques of progress narratives, racial uplift discourse, and black respectability." -- Margo Natalie Crawford * American Literary History * "Hope Draped in Black skillfully interweaves insightful arguments with theory, literature, and other aesthetic forms. . . . Strikingly relevant, and [an] important contribution to the American political imagination." -- Bianca Borrero-Barreras * Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians * "This is a very good book that is well worth reading. It does an excellent job of charting, in the words of the subtitle, 'the agony of progress.' . . . The concept of melancholic hope is jarring, anomalous, uncanny, and discomfiting. This, precisely, is its aim and virtue." -- William David Hart * Journal of the American Academy of Religion * "Vibrant, analytically rich, and deeply rewarding to read. . . . At heart, Hope Draped in Black exhibits a rare type of intellectual integrity and bravery." -- Jonathon S. Kahn * Callaloo * "Winters has produced a book that speaks to the past century of black religious life in the United States, while refusing to reduce that complex history to a single, simple theme." -- Marvin E. Wickware * Journal of Religion *
