"In Kafka’s Blues, Mark Christian Thompson goes where no other Kafka critic has ventured before, except for some timid attempts, namely on the terrain of race, as he brilliantly deconstructs the Jewish author. In doing so he virtually creates a new genre in critique of early twentieth-century European writers." —Monatshefte
"Mark Christian Thompson’s Kafka’s Blues, which offers a thought-provoking mediation on race and the animal, is ground-breaking in its attempt to read Franz Kafka’s work through the lens of African American studies . . . Thompson reminds us of the importance of revisiting the canon through an intersectional lens, particularly so when the human, the animal, and the racialized subject are ranked on an evolutionary scale of Being." —Edge Effects
"To my knowledge, Thompson is the first scholar to propose a sustained interpretation of Kafka's most important stories through the prism of African American studies; indeed, 'racial blackness in Kafka is deeply buried,' in more than one sense." —German Studies Review
“Thompson gracefully blends Kafka’s biography, narrative analysis, secondary criticism, and historical research to demonstrate how an aesthetic of blackness informed and shaped Kafka’s fiction. He performs careful, contextual readings of several of Kafka’s most influential and renowned narratives, offering novel interpretations of how they relate to the question of racial identity. This is a fascinating and compelling book.” —Robert T. Tally Jr., author of Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique
“The central topic presented here—the aesthetics of blackness in Kafka’s oeuvre—is highly original, and one that very few Kafka scholars have ever considered before. It is fascinating to see how Kafka was obsessed by blackness, and how integral it was to his thinking. With this book, Thompson reconstructs a narrative logic that has largely remained unexplored, and in doing so, establishes himself as a major Kafka scholar.”—Carl Niekerk, author of Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
