New Books In African American Studies

With the election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, many people believed that America had ushered in an era of post-racial harmony. Harvey Young is not one of them. When it comes to the racial experience of black people, particularly, though not exclusively, of black men, Young takes James Baldwin’s sage advice: “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine–but trust your experience.” I interviewed Young about his new book Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). In it, Harvey examines five “spectacular events,” including an opening autobiographical one, that persuasively reveal his argument “that embodied experiences develop, in part, from racial (mis)recognition and spotlight how an idea of the black body materially affects actual bodies” (11). In other words, Young points out how despite the multifarious identities that constitute what we know as the “African American” identity (i.e., it ain’t monolithic