We see with the skin

Sinopse

"Roshanak Kheshti considers the phrase "we see with the skin," taken from Zora Neale Hurston's 1925 short story "Black Death," a matter-of-fact declaration of a synesthetic mode of existence for Black Southerners within the Jim Crow era. We See With the Skin is a reconsideration of Hurston's prolific corpus of writings, films, audio recordings, and ethnographic fieldwork, through the framework of seeing skin. Excavating Hurston's archive, Kheshti follows Hurston's travels through the South, through Hurston's articulation of an embodied and performative ethnography, through her explorations of "skinsight" and "skinsound," and finally to her work as a folklorist interested in the tools used in making culture. Interwoven throughout her consideration of Hurston's work, Kheshti questions her own position as an anthropologist working outside of anthropology, a transplant to the American South, and a Muslim dispossessed in order to theorize the possibility of a dialogue between the Black American South and the Global South. We See With the Skin is an original, skillful mapping of Hurston's synesthetic theory and its broader implications for how we understand minoritarian perception and thought"-- Provided by publisher.