Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones. In “Notes on Trap,” he borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to reveal the social and political significance of trap music, the drug-soaked strain of Southern hip-hop that, as he puts it, is “the funeral music that the Reagan Revolution deserves.” In “Back in the Day,” McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s. In “The Master’s Tools,” the relationship between Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and his acolyte-slave, Juan de Pareja, becomes the lens through which Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are viewed, while “To Make a Poet Black” explores the hidden blackness of Sappho and the erotic power of Phillis Wheatley. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead survey the state of black letters. In his title essay, McCarthy takes on the question of reparations, arguing that true progress will not come until Americans remake their institutions in the service of true equality. As he asks, “What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes?”Known and Strange ThingsAgainst Everything

Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published articles and reviews in the journals transposition, NOVEL, and African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Ralph Ellison in Context (forthcoming) as well as a new introduction for Vincent O. Carter’s long out-of-print memoir The Bern Book (Dalkey Archive, 2020). He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? a collection of essays (Liveright, 2021) and a novel, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).