Collective Consciousness in the Age of Crisis

Abstract

ogy that remains “opaque to the white gaze” and unsettles tidy distinction between the fictive and the factual (99). Practicing its own form of overexposure, each chapter in The Matter of Black Living contains multiple subsections, each titled and geared toward a central artifact, yet Womack’s retelling takes detours in a manner that slows down and takes in the rich cultural and black intellectual life that surrounds her inquiry. It is this “overexposure” that unsettles the argumentative promise of a tidy, linear story, one with quickly discernible causes and eŠects or characters who act with consistency. Womack models a way of holding all the pieces together; of moving with the liveliness that surrounds each text, the hopes and dreams that motivated each experiment with racial data; and of sitting still with a text when the material asks it of her. Womack expands the archive and story of racial data while showing a careful, ethical way to move through it. Extending her metaphors of looking that recur, it feels as though Womack leaves open the aperture of her critical viewing longer in the hopes of providing a fuller picture. In this way, she beautifully navigates the very tensions between the historical, data, and literary archive she reads and the necessity of sitting with the matter of Black living.