Acclaimed Scholar, Philosopher, Historian, Cultural Critic, Social Theorist, Teacher, and Writer Sarah Lewis in Conversation with Ibram X. Kendi About Her New Book The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America at Politics and Prose Bookstore

Sarah Lewis — The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America - with Ibram X. Kendi

Politics and Prose

October 23, 2024

#books #booktube

VIDEO: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MumWSSo5eck

Watch author Sarah Lewis' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive "Caucasian" for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it. 

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

 

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, and editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). Lewis’s awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. A sought after public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received over 3 million views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA. 

Lewis is in conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of fifteen books for adults and children, including nine New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. Dr. Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest author to win that award. He also authored the international bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, which was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” 

 

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: 

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9...