Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

by Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals

In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood.

Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.

Genres: Race

264 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 2016

About the author

Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is the author of four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016), Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007), Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001), and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999).

Reviews

[jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of treasure to behold, stare at, to take with, and some to leave behind. Reid-Pharr is excellent and issued a calling to reframe the framing of humanities and social sciences. Using Spain as an anchor to tie practices of Euro-Western imperialism to Africa, he explores modes in which the fiction of a physical, intellectual, philosophical, and seemingly ontological distinction is blurred via unexplored histories. Each chapter profiles a phenomena where Spain is related to Africa by its affection/chokehold by white hegemony. My most active annotations and moments of joyous enlightenment came from chapters “War Archive” and “Richard Wright in the House of Girls.” I left some of his conclusions right in the book but am glad I gained a heartier view of the creation of Manhood.