Robert F. Reid-Pharr ist ein Autor, dessen Werke sich mit den komplexen Fragen von Identität und menschlicher Erfahrung auseinandersetzen. Sein Schreiben erforscht die Schnittstellen von Rasse, Sexualität und Verkörperung und bietet tiefgründige Reflexionen darüber, wie diese Elemente unser Selbstverständnis und unser Verständnis von Gesellschaft prägen. Reid-Pharr untersucht, wie historische und kulturelle Kräfte sich verflechten und individuelle wie kollektive Existenzen beeinflussen, und fordert die Leser auf, etablierte Konzepte zu überdenken. Sein Ansatz ist sowohl analytisch als auch provokativ und enthüllt komplexe Muster von Macht und Begehren.
Contends that our notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they simply been forced onto the black community. This work also argues that black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural.
Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.