Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Description

Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism. Cover......Page 1 ARCHIVES OF FLESH......Page 2 Title......Page 6 Copyright......Page 7 Dedication......Page 8 CONTENTS......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Introduction......Page 16 1. War Archive......Page 44 2. Lorca’s Deathly Poetics......Page 87 3. Langston’s Adventures in the Dark......Page 133 4. Primitive at the Plantation’s Edge......Page 165 5. Richard Wright in the House of Girls......Page 195 Conclusion......Page 230 Notes......Page 246 Index......Page 258 About the Author......Page 272