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BOOK REVIEWED: Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in Dark Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Questions of what constitutes a practice of refusal, particularly for Black people, have been greatly interrogated by scholars and thinkers in recent years. My first encounter with these lines of inquiry came through reading the work of Tina Campt, whose formative essay, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal” (2019), and groundbreaking book, Listening to Images (2017), take up these questions rigorously and audaciously.1 In both, Campt explores the ways that for her and members of “The Practicing Refusal Collective” she helped found with fellow scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman in 2015, refusal became a critical analytic through which to index some of the strategies Black people have developed and deployed to rebuff those constitutive or definitional norms and arrangements that refuse Blackness itself, particularly within the visual field. Campt observes that...