Description: In Hope Draped in Black Joseph R. Winters responds to the belief that America follows a constant trajectory of racial progress, using African American literature and film to construct an idea of hope that embraces melancholy in order to acknowledge and mourn America's traumatic history.
Review Quotes: "In lucid prose and with a fluid grasp of diverse cultural text ... Winters demonstrates how a central strain of the black cultural tradition has been to disrupt the narrative of progress.... Against historians who simply cast racial progress as historically inaccurate and posit more cyclical theories of history (that the past recurs in unexpected ways), Winters powerfully contends that progress-talk helps keep injustice in place, creating the justification for collective moral apathy toward racial violence and a disregard for radical racial disparities--all in the name of their eventual eradication."--Alex Zamalin, Political Theory
"Groundbreaking. . . . Sure to be referenced by scholars for many years to come."--Chanté Baker Martin, Journal of Southern History "The power of Hope Draped in Black is its reenergizing of the critiques of progress narratives, racial uplift discourse, and black respectability."--Margo Natalie Crawford, American Literary History "Hope Draped in Black skillfully interweaves insightful arguments with theory, literature, and other aesthetic forms. . . . Strikingly relevant, and [an] important contribution to the American political imagination."--Bianca Borrero-Barreras, Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians "This is a very good book that is well worth reading. It does an excellent job of charting, in the words of the subtitle, 'the agony of progress.' . . . The concept of melancholic hope is jarring, anomalous, uncanny, and discomfiting. This, precisely, is its aim and virtue."--William David Hart, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "Vibrant, analytically rich, and deeply rewarding to read. . . . At heart, Hope Draped in Black exhibits a rare type of intellectual integrity and bravery."--Jonathon S. Kahn, Callaloo "Winters has produced a book that speaks to the past century of black religious life in the United States, while refusing to reduce that complex history to a single, simple theme."--Marvin E. Wickware, Journal of Religion