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Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural
formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book
essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations that
focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the
“play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as
window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements,
psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the
“made-up” becomes fixed or realities or
(“scripturalization”). Modern-world racialization (and its
attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the
hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in
psycho-social relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in
this book to be one of the most consequential examples and
reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses
behind and determinants of the shape of the realities of
modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by
touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now
famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written
by Himself (1789). This story told by a complexly positioned
Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/“stranger” is itself a
“mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white
Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation).
Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case
for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern
and the perduring mixed when not also devastating consequences.
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