The Black Interior
With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.
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Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.
Artforum
Best Book of 2004
Maurice Berger, The New School
“Elizabeth Alexander’s keen observations about a broad range of African American artifacts—poems, films, photographs, and conceptual art, for example—offer far more than clever visual analysis. They set cultural objects into their broadest social context. In these perceptive and eloquent essays, Alexander continually reminds us of the power of representation—words, images, indeed art itself—to oppress, to provoke, and ultimately to liberate. The Black Interior represents the best and most resonant form of cultural history, writing that tackles life-and-death issues through the lenses of visual and literary culture.”
Valerie Smith, Princeton University
“In prose that is both elegant and clear, rigorous and accessible, Elizabeth Alexander illuminates in these essays on art, literature, film and politics, places in African American culture that elude stereotypic representations and the limits of public discourse.”
Booklist
“This original and electrifying collection greatly enriches and extends understanding of African American culture and its essential role in American culture as a whole.”