Reveals how America is a nation founded on grievance.Grievance is an American mode of being that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence, that is at the root of the Civil War and accounts in large measure for the failure of Reconstruction, that runs through the Civil Rights moment, and that showed itself again in the events of January 6, 2021. Grievance, in America, always concatenates with racism and evinces itself most violently in those moments whe...

Grant Farred has long had a passionate connection with sports. In A Sports Odyssey, he weaves together an account of his own sports fandom that is profoundly personal and universal.As readers of his Long Distance Love know, Grant Farred has been a supporter of the English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club, for decades. His fandom for that team launched an unexpected connection with a world beyond the limits of the apartheid state of his upbringing in So...

Apartheid, ironically, provided Grant Farred with the optimal conditions for thinking. He describes South Africa’s apartheid regime as an intellectual force that, “Made thinking apartheid, more than anything else, an absolute necessity.” The Perversity of Gratitude is a provocative book in which Farred reflects on an upbringing resisting apartheid. Although he is still inclined to struggle viscerally against apartheid, he acknowledges, “It is me.”Unsentimental about his ed...

Uncovering Hollywood’s perpetual longing for a lost industrial America“We don’t make things in America anymore”: like clockwork, this refrain resurfaces in political discourse, a reflection of yearning for a bygone era of industrial productivity. In his latest work, Grant Farred uses the 1990 film Pretty Woman to expose and critique this lingering nostalgia for late-industrial capitalism.Situating Pretty Woman alongside Reagan-era films in...

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of relation and Heideggerian ontology, Farred outlines how various relationships—the significantly different relationships Messi ...

In Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, Grant Farred combines autobiography with philosophical rumination to offer this unusual meditation on American racism. In the fall of 2013 while raking leaves outside his home, Farred experienced a racist encounter: a white woman stopped to ask him, “Would you like another job?” Farred responded, “Only if you can match my Cornell faculty salary.” The moment, however, stuck with him. The black man had gravitated to, of all people, Martin Heidegger...

A call to arms exploring the protest movements of 2020 as they reverberated through the athletic worldStarting with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to participate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical action. They disrupted athletic normalcy, and in their grief and rage again...

In Motion, At Rest takes up the event as a philosophical problem from a novel perspective. Grant Farred examines three infamous events in sport, arguing that theorizing the event through sport makes possible an entirely original way of thinking about it.In the first event, Ron Artest committed a flagrant foul in a National Basketball Association game, which provoked fans to hurl both invectives and beer cups. Artest and some teammates then attacked the fans. Drawi...

An intensely personal, and philosophical, account of why white America’s racial unconscious is not so unconsciousAn Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historic...

An Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.Drawing on the social and political thought of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Grant Farred examines the tempt...

A timely exploration of and intervention into the South African ideological landscape from the perspective of the colored community. In Midfielders Moment, Grant Farred explores the ways in which political fissures are being articulated in the new South Africa. By examining the politics, literature, and culture of an historically disenfranchised c

In Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, Grant Farred combines autobiography with philosophical rumination to offer this unusual meditation on American racism. In the fall of 2013 while raking leaves outside his home, Farred experienced a racist encounter: a white woman pulled over to ask him, “Would you like another job?” Farred responded, “Only if you can match my Cornell faculty salary.” The moment, however, stuck with him. The black man had gravitated to, of all people, Martin He...