TY - JOUR
AU - Higashida, Cheryl
AB - ALH Online Review, Series XLIV 1215 Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880- 1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 270 pp. Reviewed by Cheryl Higashida, University of Colorado-Boulder In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Ruha Benjamin discusses starting her talk at the inaugural Data for Black Lives conference with an ancestral roll call: “From W.E.B. Du Bois’ modernist data visualizations – dozens of graphs, charts, and maps that visualized the state of Black life – to Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s expert deployment of statistics in The Red Record (1895), which illustrated the widespread practice of lynching and White terrorism, there is a long tradition of employing and challenging data for Black lives.” Autumn Womack’s The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 is a major contribution to understanding, thinking with and living with this tradition. Womack enacts Katherine McKittrick’s formulation of Black studies in “Mathematics Black Life”: to read “the violent arithmetics of the archive” and data as “possibilities that are iterations of black life that cannot be contained by black death.” The Matter of Black Living thus joins the work 
TI - Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajae094
DA - 2024-11-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/autumn-womack-the-matter-of-black-living-the-aesthetic-experiment-of-eSyezKn3Ue
SP - 1215
EP - 1218
VL - 36
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -