Are divisive political forces the source of the historical persistence of racism and its alarming recurrence in contemporary society? Or are there also subtler, more intractable reasons for racism's irrational power and historical persistence? This collection of essays takes the study of racism into a radically new direction----that of unconscious fantasies and identities----offering perspectives from a variety of leading figures in many fields.
Christopher Lane teaches literature at Northwestern University and is a recent Guggenheim fellow. A London-born literary critic and intellectual historian, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Chronicle Review, and many other newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of, most recently, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011). His other books include Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France) and highly commended by the British Medical Association, translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Japanese, and Korean.
He writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects" (recent posts appear to the right). He also writes regularly for the Huffington Post.
