What would a post-humanist black studies look like? What new modes of reading and what vanished archives would leap back into focus if scholars attended to African American writers’ imagining of unbecoming subjectivities that disturb and dismantle the man/animal divide structuring Western humanism? These key questions prompt Robert Reid-Pharr's thought-provoking Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-humanist Critique. Building on the theories of Alexander Weheliye and Frank Wilderson, Reid Pharr contends that anti-blackness serves as the foundational relationality and corporeal bare life constituting modern Western concepts of the “human.”Footnote ¹ However, Reid-Pharr parts ways with his fellow black studies scholars, faulting them for slipping back into the humanist trap by recentering a black singularity. In contrast, Reid Pharr turns to an alternative border-crossing and carnivalesque (“fleshy”) archive – one he finds in the African American Spanish historical record – to argue that this traveling blackness imagined alternative forms of black life.

While Reid-Pharr's primary archive comes from black internationalism in Spain (and its empire, such as the Philippines), the particular sites of Reid-Pharr's investigation are those that have lain outside a long history of black US respectability politics as well as triumphant diasporic recovery projects of black identity and political consciousness. Paralleling Michelle Wright's call for new spaces and times of blackness, Reid-Pharr takes as his point of reference the ships, ports, brothels, bars, and other nodes of mobile contact where he argues black life existed outside a hysterical propriety.Footnote ² In his chapters on Chester Himes and Richard Wright, in particular, Reid-Pharr argues that these race men did not seek to claim some transcendent manhood – or to prove the black male's humanity – but created characters and selfhoods that inhabit the contradictory simultaneity of the cosmopolitan and the “beastly savage” to overturn humanism's foundational relationality that has devalued and disciplined black lives.

Reid-Pharr's reading of twentieth-century black male authors’ flaunting of fleshly excess extends earlier black feminist work (such as Carla Peterson's) investigating “grotesque” representations of the black female body.Footnote ³ However, Reid-Pharr's archive of disruptive animality often retrieves masculinist scenes and sites of gender violence: Jesse's murder of his lover Kriss in Chester Himes's 1955 novel The End of a Primitive; Richard Wright's account of the casa de chicas in his 1957 travel narrative Pagan Spain, or Langston Hughes's passive witnessing of sailors gang raping a black girl in The Big Sea (1940). Reid-Pharr's archive, thus, at times recenters scenes of post-humanist “fleshiness” that reinscribe (not disrupt) colonialism and misogyny. In his final chapter on Wright, however, Reid-Pharr addresses the functioning of a “repressed femininity” within twentieth-century race men's unsettling of humanism's constitutive racializations (206). Calling for more nuanced readings of “troubling” passages within the African American archive, Reid-Pharr highlights the value of these tensions within the historical record to demonstrate that a politics of black male post-humanism often recruited the stabilizing and contrasting logic of disposable black female bodies.

While Reid-Pharr's Archives of the Flesh builds on earlier post-humanist work, he departs significantly from his predecessors who insist on the singularity of the black experience. In his chapter on Federico García Lorca's poetry, Reid-Pharr contends that the Spanish poet depicts the “fungibility” of the non-subject within Western humanism, or, that is to say, Western modernity's substitution of various forms of devalued life as the otherness against which the “human” is defined. In his encounter with South America and with Harlem, Lorca points out this denied equivalence between blackness and brownness. Although the imagining of Africans as nameless, stateless, and cultureless persons was central to the ideological and institutional practices of transatlantic slavery, Reid-Pharr argues, there were similarly devalued non-subjects within colonialism's civilizing mission and in its complementary heteronormative body politics: the gay, the gypsy, or the indigenous. This fungibility, Reid-Pharr argues, haunts Western liberal humanism as the unthinkable.

Many will, of course, balk at Reid-Pharr's insistence on the fungibility of the black and the brown, the queer and the criminalized black body, the slave and the colonial servant; such a commensurability erases the distinctive devaluation of black life within modern Western thought that black studies scholars such as Jared Sexton, or more recently Ta-Nehisi Coates, have denounced within various forms of color-blind multiculturalism.Footnote ⁴ By identifying these “fleshy” sites of a new archive, however, Reid-Pharr expands what Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson have called a politics of impossibility, or alternative oppositional practices that fall outside the narratives of colonialism, bourgeois nationalism, and liberal gender and anti-race studies.Footnote ⁵ Such new (im)possibilities, Reid-Pharr demonstrates, offer the hope for new alliances around a shared vulnerability as non-subjects. While scholars will dispute the shape of a post-humanist black studies, Reid-Pharr's Archives of Flesh is an invaluable and paradigm-shifting contribution to this emerging field.