{"product_id":"the-racial-imaginary-writers-on-race-in-the-life-of-the-mind","title":"The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial--a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic--in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. . . . To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"So everyone is here.\"--Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from the introduction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 2011, a poem published in a national magazine by a popular white male poet made use of a black female body. A conversation ensued, and ended. Claudia Rankine subsequently created Open Letter, a web forum for writers to relate the effects and affects of racial difference and to explore art's failure, thus far, to adequately imagine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBorn in Kingston, Jamaica, \u003cb\u003eClaudia Rankine\u003c\/b\u003e is author and editor of more than six collections of poetry and poetics. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor of English at Pomona College.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBeth Loffreda\u003c\/b\u003e is author of \u003ci\u003eLosing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-gay Murder\u003c\/i\u003e. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wyoming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fence Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44434940821603,"sku":"9781934200797","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0621\/7515\/0179\/files\/imageloader_7321eb4b-63af-4f4b-ace2-1d6333bae1fb.jpg?v=1785780300","url":"https:\/\/redricebooks.com\/products\/the-racial-imaginary-writers-on-race-in-the-life-of-the-mind","provider":"Red Rice Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}