In Black Bodies That Matter, James Garrison makes it personal. In the specificity of this hugely intelligent and compelling cultural narration, Garrison weighs in against the inertia of a normative statement of fact—Black lives matter—by serving up a scathing indictment of a sleeping world that will not even say their names. The enormity of the crimes against what is our shared humanity is given weight and substance by the seemingly invincible absence of any meaningful response to the wanton injustices perpetrated against some of us. Institutionalized deafness and its unwavering commitment to saying and doing absolutely nothing escalates a weary, melancholic yet still righteous anger into a primal scream against what has always been a dead end. Garrison's story of his search for an activist and useful rage—a good, beautiful rage—is one that everyone needs to hear.

Roger T. Ames, Peking University

“James Garrison's reckoning with the existential dimensions of Black loss becomes our own reckoning with the American legacy of racial violence that, one way or another, has shaped us all. In Black Bodies That Matter: Mourning, Rage, and Beauty, a candid narrative that ranges from police violence to Black melancholy, from Kant's aesthetics to Star Trek's first Black captain, from the art of Kara Walker to the comedy of Key and Peele, Garrison develops a theory of beauty as integral to processes of grief and rage that speaks to the creative joys of Black life today.”

Leah Kalmanson, University of North Texas

This remarkable book engages a world in which Black humanity is consistently ignored. With philosophical depth and an accessible language, it exposes the layers of precarity in Black life and illuminates the civic and philosophical significance of Black melancholia, anger, and critical consciousness. It is also a rarity in philosophy: The ideas are presented with great sophistication but also with a conversational structure, and its voice is searing yet vulnerable—all of which make this work a compelling page-turner. A genuine achievement and a must read!

David H. Kim, University of San Francisco