Sentient Flesh

R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular.

• List of Illustrations  ixNotes on Translation and Transliteration  xiPreface: Preliminary Signposts  xiiiAcknowledgments  xxiIntroduction: Body and Flesh  1[1st Set]On Lohengrin's Swan  25Sentient Flesh  150[2nd Set]Sentient Flesh Dancing  215Poiēsis in Black  252Para-Semiosis  319Coda: Gifting Blues Love-Improper  418Notes  457Bibliography  543Index  573

“Sentient Flesh constitutes a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of black studies has long been-the disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of the modern world. Its extreme and profound generativity is bracing and invigorating, and it forces and allows its readers to do more, confront more, read more, and think more. I love this book, I feel this book, I am pleased by this book because I am undone and disturbed and disrupted and transported by this book.” - Fred Moten, author of (Black and Blur) “Weaving a clear and critical story about the making of the so-called Negro and how this making is deeply connected to questions of the flesh not the body, R. A. Judy makes one of the most critical arguments in contemporary humanities. Sentient Flesh is well placed to make a major intervention.” - Anthony Bogues, author of (Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom) “This text is nothing if not a call for communal forms of thinking.... R.A. Judy has presented us with an opening to consider and reconsider what it means to be Black in this world and I hope it is a challenge that is taken up and serves to enrich the archive of Black Radical Thought.” - Michael E. Sawyer (New Formations) "R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, in its 600 or so pages, stands as a monumental contribution to this literature, leading us through, sometimes in dazzling detail, a teeming array of figures, themes, disciplinary scenes, and texts in order to arrive at a full account of its main conceptual contributions." - Emanuela Bianchi (Cultural Critique)