Black Paper

Writing in a Dark Time

Teju Cole (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

288 Seiten

2021
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-64135-5 (ISBN)

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A wide-ranging collection of essays from a celebrated master of the form.

“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a collection of essays that meditate on what it means to keep our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. Cole is well-known as a master of the essay form, and in Black Paper he is writing at the peak of his skill, as he models how to be closely attentive to experience—to not just see and take in, but to think critically about what we are seeing and not seeing.

Wide-ranging in their subject matter, the essays are connected by ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about the color black and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white. Black transported the meaning.”

Teju Cole is a novelist, photographer, critic, curator, and the author of six books, which include Open City, Blind Spot, and, most recently, his photobook Fernweh. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Part One
After Caravaggio

Part Two: Elegies
Room 406
Mama’s Shroud
Four Elegies
Two Elegies
A Letter to John Berger
A Quartet for Edward Said

Part Three: Shadows
Gossamer World: On Santu Mofokeng
An Incantation for Marie Cosindas
Pictures in the Aftermath
Shattered Glass
What Does It Mean to Look at This?
A Crime Scene at the Border
Shadow Cabinet: On Kerry James Marshall
Nighted Color: On Lorna Simpson
The Blackness of the Panther
Restoring the Darkness

Part Four: Coming to Our Senses
Experience
Epiphany
Ethics

Part Five: In a Dark Time
A Time for Refusal
Resist, Refuse
Through the Door
Passages North
On Carrying and Being Carried

Epilogue
Black Paper

Acknowledgments
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	25.10.2021
Reihe/Serie	Berlin Family Lectures
Sprache	englisch
Maße	140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-226-64135-X / 022664135X
ISBN-13	978-0-226-64135-5 / 9780226641355
Zustand	Neuware