For Pleasure

Proposes that experimental aesthetics shaped race in the twentieth-century United States by creating transformative scenes of pleasure. Carroll explains how aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the production and circulation of racial meaning in the United States through a study of experimental work by authors and artists of color.

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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.

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.