Mutilated, dying, or dead, black men play a role in the psychic life of culture. From national dreams to media fantasies, there is a persistent imagining of what black men must be. This book explores the legacy of that role, particularly its violent effect on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. David Marriott draws upon popular culture, ranging from lynching photographs to current Hollywood film, as well as the ideas of key thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John Edgar Wideman, to reveal a vicious pantomime of unvarying reification...

In Haunted Life, David Marriott examines the complex interplay between racial fears and anxieties and the political-visual cultures of suspicion and state terror. He compels readers to consider how media technologies are "haunted" by the phantom of racial slavery. Through examples from film and television, modernist literature, and philosophy, he shows how the ideological image of a brutal African past is endlessly recycled and how this perpetuation of historical catastrophe stokes our nation's race-conscious paranoia.

Drawing on a range of comparative readings by writers, theorists, and...

Mutilated, dying or dead, black men have a role to play in the psychic life of culture. From consumer dreams to media fantasies, from sensual intimacy to outpourings of murderous violence, there is a persistant imagining of what black men must be; a demand that black men perform a script - become interchangeable with the uncanny, deeply unsettling projections of culture.

This book proposes a new and provocative reading of the clinical and political work of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary.

This book proposes a new and provocative reading of the clinical and political work of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary.