The Trouble with Post-Blackness by Houston A. Baker, K. Merinda Simmons (review)

CLA JOURNAL 377 Baker, Houston A. and K. Merinda Simmons, eds. The Trouble with PostBlackness . Columbia University Press, 2015. 277pp. ISBN 978-0-231-16934-9. Hardcover $30.00. In this moment inAmerica,when it is evident that black lives still do not matter, K. Merinda Simmons and Houston Baker, Jr.’s The Trouble with Post-Blackness offers thirteen responses, in addition to their own essays, to the notion of post-race and the desire to erase blackness in the contemporary moment. The contributors, some of which include Margo Natalie Greg Thomas, Riche Richardson, Dana A. Williams, Emily Raboteau, Patrice Rankine, and Ishmael Reed, treat a variation of perspectives about the state and shape of blackness (past, present, and future); particularly in a world made too difficult because of the bevy of laws, social customs, rulings and practices established to oppress black folk. Simmons bargains a provocative introduction while Baker cautions us about “the troubles that Blackness has seen and transmogrified for centuries” (253). The premise of their book is to demythologize post-Blackness using a “speckled” approach symbolized by “the sign of the Lega mask of many mouths and multiple eyes,” to denounce empirical evidence and challenge “the sample size of Touré’s research for Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now.” (252). The effort to “trouble post-blackness,” the editors tell us, is a “collaborative project” intending to broaden “’the post-Black’ rhetorical schema” (1). Contrarily, the book, declares Simmons, is not about Touré. Instead, the goal is to wrestle with “broader claims about the implications of a ‘post-black’ rhetorical schema” and deal with the notion of the slippery concept of blackness (1). The problem with this claim is that not all of the contributors ignore Touré on the way to a larger discussion of post-blackness; however, most of them do deliver on the larger-than-Touré objective. They manage a thorough discussion of blackness in “multiperspectival conversation[s] that traverses a variety of genres that investigates the ever-shifting classification of culture and capital where domains of ‘race’ are concerned” (2). A primary intervention shared among the contributors is that they“untrouble” Touré’s definition of blackness and post-blackness past, present, personal, theoretical, and future. Moreover, they heed the editors’ charge and examine the impulse of race “as a necessary signifier of difference [but do not leave] whiteness alone as a cohesive whole”(3). Indeed, in different ways they manage to dissect the influence of whiteness on why and how blackness is conceived. Along the way they tackle the “obvious realities of how inequity and power are manifested through racial designations” (3). This “multiperspectival” objective and accomplishment renders The Trouble with Post-Blackness a significant think piece on cultural currency. What also makes The Trouble with Post-Blackness a helpful contribution Book Reviews 378 CLA JOURNAL to discussions of blackness is each contributor’s ability to introduce readers to nuanced approaches to history, theory and aesthetics of blackness in a context that empower readers to question contemporary urgings that seek to erase or problematize blackness to begin with. For instance, Natalie Margo Crawford, Dana L. Williams, Ishmael Reed, and Stephanie Li effectively show what it means to be revolutionary or unique in their discussions of literature, culture, and Black Aesthetics, without threatening the erasure of blackness. As a corrective measure, these essays extend what blackness is and/or does. Indeed,readers forget that Touré was the catalyst for the writers’s dialogue of post-blackness while also assessing the perils and flaws of the conception of personal space that Mr. Touré deems“beyond discourse.” As the contributors situate blackness within an aesthetic and historical discourse that initially made it relevant and necessary, their collective responses eliminate notions of “a priori blackness” and name it in “complicated ways” just as the editors Simmons and Baker intended (15). They correct and extend Touré’s interpretation of post-Blackness as bound to “a profoundly individual and subjective process of self-identification…beyond discourse and impervious to question or critique” (8). One essay that particularly resonates with me is Ishmael Reed’s hard-hitting examination of post-race or post-black through...