The Matter of Black Living

Explore the fascinating relationship between turn-of-the-century Black cultural producers and the new technologies of racial data in The Matter of Black Living. This book delves into how African American life was approached as an empirical problem to be solved using social survey, photography, and film, which resulted in a "racial data revolution." However, cultural producers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life. Discover this fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness and how it reshapes the political and aesthetic work of racial data.