The traditional assumption today about race is that it is not political; that it has no political content and is a matter of individual beliefs and attitudes. In Race and the Politics of the Exception, Utz McKnight argues that race is in fact political and defines how it functions as a politics in the United States.McKnight organizes his book into three sections, beginning with a theoretical section about racial politics in the United States. Using theorists such as Benjam...

Free Black woman, poet, novelist, essayist, speaker, and activist, Frances Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth century’s most important advocates of Abolitionism and female suffrage, and her pioneering work still has profound lessons for us today.In this new book, Utz McKnight shows how Harper’s life and work inspired her contemporaries to imagine a better America. He seeks to recover her importance by examining not only her vision of the possibilities of Emancipation, but als...

While much focus has been placed on Black Lives Matter activism in response to police and civilian murders of Black men and women, the contributors argue that Black activism in this era has addressed a broader range of issues in a wide array of settings, both on the street and inside institutions and communities. This Era of Black Activism includes chapters on this era of Black activism from 2000-2022. It describes how previous activism has influenced this generation, while showing innovat...

An original contribution to political theory and cultural studies this work argues for a reinterpretation of how race is described in US society. McKnight develops a line of reasoning to explain how we accommodate racial categories in a period when it has become important to adopt anti-racist formal instruments in much of our daily lives.The discussion ranges over a wide theoretical landscape, bringing to bear the insights of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Michel Foucault, Cornel We...