Namwali Serpell
Stranger Faces
Stranger Faces
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If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call “humanity.” The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.
What about the strange face, the stranger’s face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.
- National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
- Believer Book Award Finalist
- A New Yorker Best Book of 2020
- Author: Namwali Serpell
- Publisher: Transit Books
- Publication: October 20, 2020
- ISBN: 9781945492433
- Size: 5 in. x 7 in.
- 196 pages
- Namwali Serpell is a Professor of English at Harvard University. Her first monograph, a work of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020), was long listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her essay, “River of Time,” was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021, and “She’s Capital,” won the 2023 American Society of Magazine Editor’s Award for Reviews and Criticism.
