Unexplained Presence - Tisa Bryant

Unexplained Presence

By: Tisa Bryant, Margo Jefferson

Paperback | 17 January 2024

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***Now with a new afterword by MARGO JEFFERSON***

In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mis-en-scenes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's Darling, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Parkand Virginia Woolf'sOrlando, giving voice to characters whom have otherwise been structurally silenced. As Pulitzerprize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved.

Industry Reviews

"For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media-characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or Francois Ozon's 8 Femmes -but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings."-Publishers Weekly

"Bryant's essay title also captures the way 'radical writing' (not 'just' writing) seems to have become, for some poets, a synonym primarily for poetry, eliding a great deal of radical drama, nonfiction, and fiction, to say nothing of cross-genre prose." -Jacket2

"What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning." -San Francisco Bay Guardian

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