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Maybe someday
49
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Namwali Serpell
Publisher:
Transit Books
Date:
October 20, 2020
In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger facesâthe disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the deadâNamwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face.
What The Reviewers Say
... sharp.
... wander[s] and wonder[s] and suppose[s] more than it state[s] outright.
In Stranger Faces, Harvard professor Namwali Serpell uses semiotics to describe her version of a 'failed face.' An award-winning novelist, Serpell’s writing spans literary criticism, short stories, and film reviews, and Stranger Faces adds to her skill in writing across genres. The second book in the Undelivered Lectures series, Stranger Faces reads more like a collection of intellectually rigorous long-form blog posts than an academic monograph.
... 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.
