"Black Death"
"Brown commons"
A01=Roshanak Kheshti
acoustic ecology
American South
Author_Roshanak Kheshti
Black feminism
Black speech
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSL
conjure
critical aunty studies
Cudjo Lewis
encryption
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic film
forthcoming
fugitive
hapticity
Hoodoo
initiation ceremony
Jim Crow
Jose Esteban Munoz
labor
migrancy
Miguel Covarrubias
Nashville
performance ethnography
respectability politics
roots
Sanctified Church movement
signifying
skin
speaking subject
speech act theory
synesthesia
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033394
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Roshanak Kheshti opens her book with a line from one of Zora Neale Hurston's earliest stories: “we see with the skin.” From this brief but potent line, Kheshti examines how Hurston’s understanding of Black skin as both seen and seeing offers radical insight into racialized perception and Black consciousness. Kheshti follows Hurston’s travels across the back woods of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana as a filmmaker and sensory ethnographer of the African diasporic spiritual practice of hoodoo. Through her travels, Hurston encountered a sensibility that could animate the object status of being colored with the power of a return gaze. Kheshti considers both how Hurston poetically exploited the synesthetic logic at the heart of race thinking—being colored—as well as how her embodied performance ethnography catalogued an outside to that logic. We See With the Skin is an original mapping of Hurston’s synesthetic theory and its broader implications for understanding minoritarian perception and thought.
Roshanak Kheshti is Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music and Switched-on Bach.
