Blackness, as the entertainment and sports industries well know, is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, black culture invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while at the same time offering the illusory reassurance that they remain "wholly" white. Charting a rich landscape that includes classic American literature, Hollywood films, pop music, and investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other mirroring of racial symbolic capital.

Black Mirror is a timely reflection on the ways provocative representations of racial difference serve to sustain white cultural dominance. As Lott demonstrates, the fraught symbolism of racial difference props up white hegemony, but it also tantalizingly threatens to expose the contradictions and hypocrisies upon which the edifice of white power has been built. Mark Twain's still-controversial depiction of black characters and dialect, John Howard Griffin's experimental cross-racial reporting, Joni Mitchell's perverse penchant for cross-dressing as a black pimp, Bob Dylan's knowing thefts of black folk music: these instances and more show how racial fantasy, structured through the mirroring of identification and appropriation so visible in blackface performance, still thrives in American culture, despite intervening decades of civil rights activism, multiculturalism, and the alleged post-racialism of the twenty-first century. In Black Mirror, white and black Americans view themselves through a glass darkly, but also face to face.

About the Author
Eric Lott is Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Reviews
This is a rich book. Eric Lott made worlds I thought I knew look unexplored: more interesting, more cryptic, more threatening, more alive. -- Greil Marcus
The 'Black Mirror' does not exactly reproduce blackness; it activates fantasies of blackness that are crucial to the reproduction of white national selfhood. Lott begins with a timely, uncannily lucid account of Barack Obama's usage of cross-racial mirrorings throughout his presidency. This book is poised to intervene in the most difficult and significant of contemporary and political questions. A monumental achievement. -- Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
Eric Lott reveals the syncopated rhythms of racial fantasy that serve as the enduring backbeat of American culture. He posits that a 'black mirror' works overtime in American culture to produce a fantasy of white masculinity and plenitude. This book is insightful, timely, and stunningly written. -- Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University
[Lott] has important things to say about how race functions in contemporary U.S. culture. -- D. C. Mauss * Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674967717
Author Eric Lott
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint The Belknap Press
Publisher Harvard University Press