Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays

In Notes on Trap , McCarthy borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to dissect the significance of trap music in American society, while in The Master's Tools , Velazquez becomes a lens through which to view Kehinde Wiley's paintings. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine survey the state of black letters. In The Time of the Assassins , McCarthy, a black American raised in France, writes about returning to Paris after the Bataclan massacre and finding a nation in mourning but dangerously unchanged. Taken together, these essays portray a brilliant critic at work, making sense of our dislocated times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art, identity and representation.