Robert F. Reid-Pharr je autorem, jehož díla se zabývají komplexními otázkami identity a lidské zkušenosti. Jeho psaní se ponořuje do průsečíků rasy, sexuality a tělesnosti a nabízí hluboké zamyšlení nad tím, jak tyto prvky formují naše porozumění sobě samým i společnosti. Reid-Pharr zkoumá, jak se historické a kulturní síly prolínají a ovlivňují individuální a kolektivní existence, a vyzývá čtenáře k přehodnocení zavedených konceptů. Jeho přístup je analytický i provokativní a odhaluje složité vzorce moci a touhy.
Contends that our notions of black American identity are not inevitable, nor have they simply been forced onto the black community. This work also argues that black American intellectuals have actively chosen the identity schemes that seem to us so natural.
Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood. Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.