"In a world where the category of race too easily conjures up the ugliest aspects of social inequality, xenophobia, and racial violence, Rachel Carroll's exquisite new book reminds us that racial difference can also be a site of extraordinary beauty, imagination, and communion. Through a meticulous and generous reading of twentieth-century experimental cultural forms, For Pleasure recovers a tradition of Black and Asian American artists refiguring race as an open invitation to ceaselessly play with and recombine the various facets of phenotypical difference. The artists Carroll assembles ultimately aim to wholly disorganize our sense of what counts as beautiful, opening up the field of pleasure to continual revision.
" - Ramzi Fawaz, author of Queer Forms "Thrilling and inventive at every turn. Carroll seeks to recover aesthetic and erotic pleasure in literary, visual, and performative art, and she does so in unexpected ways and places. In arguing that aesthetic pleasure and innovation can undo the unfreedom of racism in which we find ourselves, this well-argued and stylistically sophisticated book reveals experimental art to be an undeniable vehicle of social theory.
" - GerShun Avilez, University of Maryland
