Humane Insight

""With perceptive and original analysis, Baker moves us through a series of historical moments when images of black pain and death made black suffering legible to a wider public.""--Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 ""This groundbreaking book is a corrective to recent arguments that have misunderstood the role of representations of black suffering and death in empowering a people. With insight and keen observation, it illuminates how proponents of black freedom and dignity employed difficult images to alter public opinion and spur change.""--Maurice Berger, University of Maryland Baltimore County ""The scholarship presented by Baker is sound with expert use of various categories of criticism and philosophy, including literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and sociology. This book is a much needed contribution to African American cultural studies. Baker offers fresh insights and deft interpretations suffering and death imagery. Her discussion of the psycho-political work of Emmett Till's beaten and abused body during the Civil Rights Era, for instance, is particularly astute. I recommend this text highly.""--Debra Walker King, author of African Americans and the Culture of Pain