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Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space
by Irvin Weathersby Jr.
A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voice.
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country's landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America's landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation's true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.
"A moving examination of controversial public monuments that confronts our nation's troubled past ... Weathersby writes with passion and clarity about the shameful history of chattel slavery, racial segregation, anti-Black violence, the brutal conquest of Native Americans, and the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, weaving this history of racial humiliation and oppression into his contemporary observations about the importance of monumentality and public art ... A spirited and often poetic treatment of an important and timely topic." —Kirkus Reviews
"In language gorgeous enough to be lyric, Irvin Weathersby Jr. helps us examine some of the stone grotesquerie erected and living among us—the remainders of before, the reminders of blood. And in doing so with such care, he's granted us this work, a new monument to gaze at. One that should be raised and never razed. One that should be seen for what it is, an awe-striking masterpiece of love." —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it's the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I've ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we've never before seen, felt, or witnessed." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
"When James Baldwin talked about being a witness, Irvin Weathersby's In Open Contempt is what he meant. With accounts and observations equally enlightening, enraging, harrowing, and hopeful, Weathersby guides the reader through contemporary and historical spaces both public and private with an unflinching veracity. It is, in fact, when he illustrates how the borders between time and distance are artificial, and the 'then' and the 'now' are inexorably linked, that the narrative sings most sublimely. In Open Contempt is an intelligent implication and a courageous achievement." —Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of The Prophets, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
This information about In Open Contempt was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College in the MFA Creative Writing program. His writing has been featured in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.
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Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.
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