The Right to Opacity

In contemporary public discourse, transparency is surreptitiously held up as a social good. If a politician, citizen, or person claims to be transparent, then they also claim to be more trustworthy, honest, and ethical. My book offers a critique of this ideal of transparency by turning to a global collection of African and African diasporic writers who reimagined ideals of ethical and equitable relations by revaluing opacity, nebulosity, unreadability, and the non-revelatory in their novels, poetry, and art.