Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People) - Hardcover

"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 * "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 * "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 * "Groundbreaking. . . . Sure to be referenced by scholars for many years to come." -- Chante Baker Martin * Journal of Southern History * "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 *

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.