For Pleasure : Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics

Shortlisted, 2024 MLA Prize Prize for a First Book, given by the Modern Language Association Argues that aesthetic pleasure plays a key role in both racial practices and struggles against racist domination For Pleasure proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Rachel Jane Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the production and circulation of racial meaning in the United States through a study of experimental work by authors and artists of color. For Pleasure offers methods for reading experimental literature and art produced by racially minoritized authors and artists working in and around the US, including Isaac Julien, Nella Larsen, Yoko Ono, Jack Whitten, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon, Zora Neale Hurston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Cici Wu. Along the way, we learn what a racist joke has to do with the history of monochrome painting, if beauty has a part to play in social change, and whether whimsy should be taken seriously as a political affect. Carroll draws attention to key connections between aesthetic pleasure and experimentation through their shared capacity for world-building. Neither aesthetic pleasure nor experimental forms are liberatory in and of themselves; however, both can interrupt, defamiliarize, and rearrange our habits of aesthetic judgment.