Masks

What is race? A biological fact a social construction or an assumed disguise? In Masks: Blackness Race and the Imagination acclaimed novelist and critic Adam Lively offers a brilliant exploration of how the concept of blackness has evolved in Western thought and literature and how changing notions of racial identity helped to shape modern consciousness.<p>Lively traces ideas of racial difference to their earliest expressions in European culture at the time of the Europeans' first encounters with African and American peoples and follows these ideas to their current incarnations in contemporary America and the Caribbean. He explores the various and sometimes reversible ways in which racial identity has functioned as a mask: the pure white soul inside the black person; the primitive dark soul ready to break through the civilized white veneer; the invisible black whose identity consists of projected white fears. Examining a wide range of works over the last three centuries -- including stave autobiographies sentimental romances propagandist verse natural history jazz (a music of disguises) and such 20th-century writers as Conrad Richard Wright James Baldwin Ralph Ellison John Updike Eugene O'Neill and others -- Lively explores the fluidity of racial identity. He argues that the modernist concern with the uncertainties of identity and indeed that modernism's relativistic ironic pluralistic and perpetually questioning characteristic are derived largely from black experience of a shifting sense of self.<p>Lucidly written and covering an enormous historical expanse Masks uncovers the changing ways we have tried to understand the elusive and often illusory nature ofracial identity.