Synopsis
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 and compulsive fascination, of whites looking at themselves through images of black desolation, and of blacks dispossessed by that process.
Booknews
Marriott (literature scholar, academic affiliation not provided) offers five elegantly written, insightful essays exploring the symbolic code of black men in the psychic life of culture. Themes examined include photography and lynching; photography and fantasies of black men; black types/stereotypes; an account of Frantz Fanon, a disillusioned black Frenchman who fought in WWII but found himself despised by the French he helped liberate; and stories of black fatherhood. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)