The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind

"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.

"It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic—in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination...