Stranger Faces
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New Yorker Best Book of 2020
"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging."—The New York Times
"Serpell’s vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.
What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Serpell (The Old Drift) delivers a brilliant essay collection that, informed by semiotics, proposes a way of thinking about the human face that views each person's countenance as possessed of culturally and individually constructed meaning that can change radically according to the beholder. To develop this idea, Serpell offers different examples of "stranger" (in the sense of both "uncanny"and "unknown") faces. In the first essay, she discusses Joseph Merrick, the Victorian man known as the Elephant Man for his severe deformities. She asks what would happen "if we chose not to treat Merrick's non-ideal face as a problem that stumps our aesthetic, affective, and ethical beliefs?" Each subsequent essay has a similarly bold question at its core. One muses over the dispute over the racial identity of Hannah Crafts, author of the supposedly autobiographical 19th-century slave narrative The Bondswoman's Narrative, and what this says about readers' desire to "put a face to the name" of an author, as they say, and, in this case, "a race to the face." Another considers the different meanings assigned to the "blank stare" of bears by different participants in Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man, and why some people find sublimity, and others, terror, in the essential unknowability of wild animals. Serpell's vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again.
