Stranger Faces

by Namwali Serpell

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Zambia, Disability, Theory

140 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2020

About the author

NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39 in 2014. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing.

THE OLD DRIFT is her first novel. The chapter entitled "The Falls" is derived from The Autobiography of An Old Drifter, by the historical figure, Percy M. Clark (1874-1937).

Reviews

[Lauren]

"The history of literature and art is littered not just with 'The Ideal Face' but also with stranger faces... the essays in this book take up a range of recalcitrant and unruly faces : the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the dead face, the faces we see in objects, the animal face, the blank face, and the digital face."

From the Introduction essay of STRANGER FACES by Namwali Serpell, 2020.

Lapping up the literary criticism, semiotics, aesthetics, & film theory in this essay collection! What a delight!

Serpell constructs 5 essays around the concept of 'the face'.
▫️"Elephant in Rooms" - Joseph Merrick, 'the Elephant Man' - discourse on representations of Cleopatra, and the transformation of Michael Jackson
▫️"Two-Faced" - the narrative & provenance of 'The Bondswoman's Narrative', the manuscript by an enslaved woman from the 1850s. Discussion of passing, and the authenticity of the work.
▫️"Mop Head" - Hitchcock doppelgängers in 1960's Psycho. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, the shower scene, and the anthropomorphism of objects in film classic.
▫️"Bear Head" - Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man" documentary about the life & death of Timothy Treadwell. Animal faces, death, blankness, "extreme sublime" in film.
▫️"E-Faced" 😂 - history + evolution of symbols in written digital language: emoticon, kaomoji, emoji. What symbols convey, linguistic universality, the rise of gifs, AAVE, representative emojis.

While academic, these essays are quite accessible (films and emojis!) and very enjoyable if you like delving into linguistics, theory, and critical analysis.

General themes here remind me of the wonderful essay series I've discussed here before, THE FACE essays by Tash Aw, Chris Abani, Ruth Ozeki, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, published by Restless Books.

Serpell's essays take a less personal approach than the aforementioned, still with exploration of "face" and various interpretations.

Short story "chaser": "The Sack" by Namwali Serpell, from AFRICA 39 anthology, ed. by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. A winding tale - a story that turns in on itself like a möbius strip... equal parts clever and head-scratching.

[Charlott · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite kind of non-fiction is a truly probing one, where you follow thought connected to next thought, consider theories. Texts which are associative in nature, and a bit troubling in effect (as in troubling your set way of thinking, as in uncanny, to spark new troubling questions).

Namwali Serpell’s small little book Stranger Faces – part of a new series of “undelivered lectures” – is such a kind of text. Starting from theories about The Ideal Face – which might signify things such as identity, authenticity, transparency, truth – Serpell turns to the kind of faces rarely envisioned in this kind of theoretical discussion. She turns to “stranger faces”, the double meaning very much intended, and complicates theories while uncovering some underlying assumptions on race, ability, and gender.

In five essays Serpell dissects different texts and films to discuss ideas about/around faces: from The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick and disability to racial ambiguity and The Bondwoman’s Narrative to the emergence and use of emojis. Each of these essays got very interesting points, though I struggled a bit to follow the chapter on Hitchcock’s Psycho, especially as I have never seen the film (which is on me and not the book).

While reading the essays my mind also wandered to other texts. I thought of the Faces series in which Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code Ruth Ozeki and Chris Abani’s The Face: Cartography of the Void were published. But I also Max Czollek’s Gegenwartsbewältigung in which he discusses a German right-wing/ conservative politician’s claim that to “show one’s face” is part of German culture (of course in the context of an anti-Muslim discourse) and how the discussion has changed now with the pandemic (nationalism so flexible).

In the end, I might not agree with every single point made in the book but these essays got me re/thinking and lightened a spark in me. I started to imagine how an autistic reply might look like (with regards to the importance of face impressions and ideas of humanity) or a reply which takes the thoughts of the Hitchcock essay and brings these together with discussions of the potential trans villain portrayal. So many possibilities. And this book is a wonderful door opener to all these thoughts.

[Dev · Rating 5 out of 5]

That AP Lang MCQ section was devious.
"Look at me" be so fr

[aqilahreads · Rating 3 out of 5]

stranger faces is a collection of essays reconsidering how we think about faces through the lens of films, books, emoji and more.

this is such an interesting & unique read bc never thought i would read something about faces and how we look at it??? :-) :-( :-|

however, honestly cant really vibe with some or the essays but no doubt that they are thoughtful and well researched. found myself googling alot of things just bc im so curious omg e.g. about joseph merrick, "the elephant man".

i wish it was an easier read though, maybe im not really a fan of these kind of essays. its very short too so probably would help if things are more elaborated.

i think i enjoyed the essay about emoji the most, followed by "the elephant man". also makes me super blessed of the invention of emoji. 😂😂😂

"people of all ages understand that a single emoji can say more about their emotions than text...i accept that its difficult to use emoji to express complicated or nuanced feelings but they are great for getting the general message across".

[Deep · Rating 2 out of 5]

LOOK AT ME. You can’t 😌🙏.

Guys what is this…

She’s trying to be deep so bad but I feel like it fell short for me.

[Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant, understated essay collection from an established younger scholar that perfectly makes the pivot from academic audience to popular audience. It's also the second book in Transit Books' fabulous new Undelivered Lectures series. The central concept of the collection isn't too complicated: what if we stop thinking about faces as faces and think of them instead as (semiotic) signs that communicate meaning, and the crisp structure of the book underlines the simplicity of the central argument but belies the complexity of what it means to revise our approach to faces. I'm honestly not sure which is more brilliant (fortunately I don't need to choose!) the series from Transit Books or Serpell herself.

[naviya · Rating 5 out of 5]

- covers a really fun and intriguing variety of pop-culture examples!! michael jackson, hitchcock's psycho, emojis etc
- very conversational but also quite academic and nuanced;; honestly could have been a bit longer
- there is so much to unpack here and so many trains of thought to talk about;; oh i wish to be a grad student assigning this to my college class
- keywords: play, abyss, uncanny, fetish, commodity, obscuration of labour, mask, overlay
- so fun and playful!!
- i will be reading this again :) my fave parts were the one abt psycho and michael jackson!!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Recommended if you're in the mood for some well researched and thought provoking essays on faces (trust me, it works!).

[Regan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounding up— more academically written than I expected (188 footnotes/citations in 163 pages), but still so engaging. The last two essays of five were my favorites, the ones on Herzog’s film “The Grizzly Man” and emojis. One more thing that's been on my mind is that Serpell seems to really reflect on, move around, and explore the questions she's raising about the Ideal Face without building toward any definitive conclusions. Thought-provoking and worthwhile? Definitely. Satisfying? Maybe not always.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put Stranger Faces on my 2021 TBR after being hugely impressed by Namwali Serpell’s essay on empathy in fiction. Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard, so it’s no surprise that these short essays on faces as signifiers have an academic bent. All have moments of real, accessible insight, but most use an interpretive framework that feels a little alien to somebody like me, who’s used to reading texts either as a historian or as an ‘ordinary reader’, whatever that is, rather than being trained in film or literary criticism. Serpell’s interested in how texts, both written and visual, are put together, excavating their juxtapositions and shots for layers of meaning, whereas I tend to think of texts in terms of story structure and unreliable narration. For example, ‘Mop head’, her analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the murder of Marion Crane, focuses heavily on the visual doubling that transfers the viewer’s interest from Marion to her sister Lila, whereas I’m more interested in thinking about Marion as a decoy protagonist and how this affects the storytelling (although unlike Serpell, I’m certainly no expert on Psycho!)

Both our sets of interests come together in ‘Two-faced’, Serpell’s essay on Hannah Crafts’ ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’, a novel that may have been written between 1853 and 1861 by an enslaved woman. If this book was really written by an escaped female slave, it would be the ‘only known novel written by a fugitive from slavery and the first by an African-American woman.’ However, as Serpell outlines, since this text was republished in 2002, academics have fiercely debated its ‘authenticity’, with some arguing that it was written by a white abolitionist. Serpell points out the anachronistic claims made by critics such as John Bloom, who argued that the text could not really have been written by an enslaved woman because of its multiple literary references and sophisticated vocabulary, which ignores the erudition of former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley. However, she also deconstructs our assumptions about what makes a text ‘real’ or ‘fake’, highlighting Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s argument that no text can be truly pure, and that our instinctive assumptions about ‘tells’ that reveal a text’s authorship are often wrong (Crafts’ class snobbery has been cited by critics as a sign that Crafts must have been white and as a sign she must have been black). This reminded me, incidentally, of the female reviewer who thought Jane Eyre must have been written by a man because the writer had such a poor knowledge of women’s clothes.

Although I admired ‘Two-faced’, the real gem here is ‘E-faced’, the final essay in Stranger Faces, which I absolutely loved. ‘E-faced’ focuses on emoji, and while I’m sure Serpell is not the first writer to analyse emoji, this is the first serious piece on them I’ve read, and I found it fascinating. Serpell points out that emoji were intended to clarify meaning but, like all languages, have developed shifting and uncertain meanings of their own. She also thinks about how we use emoji – often ‘stacking’ them, posting multiple emoji in one go – and how emoji are almost always unnecessary, but add a kind of warmth to a message (which I guess makes sense of why I, personally, so often add a pointless one to the end of a text, e.g. ‘Hope you have a good time at the party!’ 🎉) There are also some great bits of trivia. Wittgenstein experimented with ‘proto-emoji’ in his ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ in the late 1930s, arguing that simplified drawings of expressions could make language more flexible and more precise. And the word ’emoji’ has nothing to do with e- as in electronic or emo- as in emotion, but comes from the Japanese words e (picture) and moji (character). Interesting stuff! 👍

[tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

maybe i’m not at a high enough intellectual level to understand this but i did not get this at all. the ideas felt contradictory and confused tf out of me. dnf like halfway through cuz it hurt my brain 💔

[Lindsay · Rating 1 out of 5]

AP Lang exam
Look at me when I say this
Oh wait, you can’t 😐

🤬🤬🤬🤬
she is onto NOTHING

[Marie Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Look at me. I know, you can’t.”

[Alpaca · Rating 1 out of 5]

look at me. i know. you cant.
ts is not tuff 🥀🥀🥀

[Faith Krzak]

hold on guys im intrigued

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this thinking it'd be more like Restless Books' The Face series and was pleasantly surprised to find this lighter on autobiography, delving more into theory and criticism. Very easy to follow along even if you're not acquainted with each essay's main topic. I'd never heard of The Bondswoman but think it's necessary to add to my TBR and only had a nodding acquaintance with The Elephant Man and Grizzly Man but still found the essays on these fascinating. The essay on emojis/emoticons/gifs/(digital) symbols was easily my favorite, with the one on The Bondswoman being the runnerup. The idea of sampling the work of other authors and "blackening" them in The Bondswoman reminded me of BIPOC &/or queer poets taking texts, often anti-* ones, to make hybrid works that subvert the meaning of the originals.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

(*_*)

[MaryJo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This set of essays was surprisingly challenging. I read Serpell's first novel, The Old Drift, with enthusiasm, and when I saw this book was getting allocades, I was curious about it. The introduction starts off with some conceptual tools: including Levinas's work on the face, and Marxist and psychoanalytic ideas about fetishes. Each of the following chapters take as an example a cultural product--a play, a book, a movie, and analyzes it. Throughout she is attentive to issues of race and gender. The chapter on Alfred Hitchcock's Pyscho was fascinating reading--I went back and re-watched the movie in a new way. The last chapter is about emojis, and how we use them. In the Psycho chapter she talks about the pleasure we take in seeing faces. Later chapters take up these ideas of pleasure and play. I don't think understood all the connections--and leaps--she was making, but I did ended of thinking about what art does in new ways.

[Dr. Bower · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting essays about the intricacies of what it means to be human through the lens of the human face. I’m not crazy about all the Freud references. Or the fact that every topic was somehow related to fetishes. The conclusion brought it all together nicely - probably my favorite part. Especially the idea of GIFs as the new black face through the over emotionalizing of the black femme.

[Kate Kampner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Serpell’s writing was creative and thought provoking. It was a really unique concept- the perception of the face through media, people, and technology- but I found that it wasn’t as concrete as I hoped. I think she had great essays on animalism, technology, and even emojis, but did not feel like I could put them all together in a category.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing I find intriguing about this collection of essays/lectures is how it conjures a whisper from within me that it belongs on one of my forthcoming college course syllabi, yet I don't know exactly which one. Like it might be a catalyst for a new seminar of some sort.
And that bit on the mop in Psycho--wowzers!

[Sarah :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, but felt like a collection of magazine pieces. Not a lot of cohesion, but serpell is clearly an excellent cultural critic, even if that's not what this was about.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

First book to get me out of my reading slump, I read it in two days and it was a great change of pace. I love the "face" as framework/topic/question, and my favorite essay was "Bear Head."

[Stella Ding · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful read on a thanksgiving. A little nerdy but very profound. The concept is simple - we treat faces with special meanings. We feel like being a human means that you have a face. But with many expansive examples from real life, movies and technologies even the author really instills this idea from many angles. The Elephant Man questions us whether we need to define a perfect face or Norma face or should we look at all “strange” faces as a work of art? The Hannah Crafts story challenges us about the relationship of identity and face. Whether the face really can determine who we are and how others perceive us. The Psycho example is my least favorite especially given that I watched the movie. The example of Grizzly Man is such an intriguing one. I have heard this story many times but this angle is so unique. We see what we want to see in faces. The discussion of whether humans can be part of nature is always controversial. The movie “into the wild” pushes it to another level. The last chapter feels super relevant given now we are all in the age of texting. Seeing emojis less as part of a sentence or punctuation, it is an attempt for us to mimic facial and body expressions like in person conversation through text. Even the stacking of emojis provides a way to communicate intensity of the emotions. What a brilliant interpretation! A hidden gem. Absolutely recommend it.

[Lisa Eckstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of essays, Serpell ponders faces in a variety of cultural contexts. Each of the five essays is tied to a specific piece of history or media and combines footnoted research with more abstract theorizing. One essay starts by focusing on the life and portrayals of Joseph Merrick ("the Elephant Man"), moves into the ways faces are rendered in different styles of art, and ends up at Cleopatra and Michael Jackson. Another analyzes scenes in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho to show how the film plays with faces and reflections. Throughout the collection, Serpell discusses how ideas of beauty, race, and gender influence our reactions to faces, both in life and in art.

I wouldn't have picked up a collection like this if not for my enthusiasm for the author, and it was an interesting reading experience not entirely to my taste. I generally enjoyed whenever the essays provided historical information and more concrete cultural criticism, but my attention wandered at the parts I'd call philosophical musings. My favorite essay was the last one, which explores emoji usage and how we communicate with those little digital faces. I'd recommend this book to readers inclined toward this sort of essay, and I'll take the opportunity to once again recommend Serpell's incredible novel, THE OLD DRIFT.

[Gabie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never thought about faces (and everything unexpected or not ideal about them) more than I have reading this book– though that should be expected since it is literally called Stranger Faces.

Among all the essays, the last one was my favourite. We're definitely seeing an interesting time in language and technological development, but this was one of my faves because it was touching on the anthropomorphization of machines and technology in general. Working in tech and just being a part of the information age, we "put a face on things" to make people comfortable, and I've been guilty of doing similar on products I've worked on, but it was interesting to see in the larger context of the preconceived role of a `face` in the different essays. It wasn't explicitly discussed in the essay, but the culmination of the book truly made me examine the role of faces in society, so I feel that's it definitely done it its job in make its readers think critically.

I'm definitely going to pick up a copy of Serpell's debut novel, and I'm curious to see how it fares compared to her fiction/essays. I've super enjoyed this read and will definitely be picking up her next book as well. I've also looked into the first book in the Undelivered Lectures series discussing Lectures, and if Stranger Faces is any sort of indicator, that book will be a great think piece as well.

[Yara · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an age of totalizing theories, it’s nice to watch someone expertly pull a single idea through a needle’s eye. “Stranger Faces,” by Namwali Serpell, is one such exercise. The book’s catalytic inquiry—“what counts as a face and why?”—means to undermine the face, the way its expressive capabilities give it the cast of truth. We seek meaning in a shallow arrangement of eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth, despite how often faces lie, or how often they cloak the world-ordering phenomena of race, gender, and class. Rather than depress or shame readers with these facts, Serpell delights in them. Unencumbered by truth, the face becomes interesting, motile—a work of art. (“Unruly faces” are especially intriguing, according to Serpell, because they invite viewers to sever ties with the placidity of an ideal.) Serpell, a Harvard professor and critic capable of close-reading people just as well as novels or films, includes a dancing range of examples. Her first essay considers the moniker given to Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, whose features aren’t, in fact, so elephantine; another essay, on Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” becomes a study of Keanu Reeves’s himbo appeal. Serpell
can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

A series of essays on the real, metaphorical, and metonymic meanings of “face,” using the Elephant Man, racial passing, Psycho, and Grizzly Man as some of his examples of the hidden face, the duplicitous face, the blank face, and so forth—all related to how faces serve as our basis “knowing” others. That idea for the book is fertile ground for exploring. However, I cannot take seriously any arguments founded upon Freud’s own unexamined assumptions, all free of scientific rigor. Evidence-free sophistries and assumptions are too much on tap throughout the book, along with a paucity of definitions, and a tendency to conjure “examples” willy-nilly via puns: “‘a’ sounds like ‘b’ (pun), so, yeah, that’s part of what I’m talking about too.” The topics Serpell has chosen are interesting, but his presentations are so laden with inept theorizing that, say, a comparison of blank expressions by humans and bears is less enlightening than predetermined by theoretical prediction. One is an emotionally and intellectually satisfying conclusion, the other a dull matter of checking off items from a list.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Namwali Serpell wrote "The Old Drift," which was a big, fascinating, ambitious book that maybe didn't quite hit the (very high) mark it was aiming for, even if had dozens of great scenes and characters and sentences. This smaller but similarly ambitious book sort of had the same effect on me. It's almost always engaging but also always just... I dunno, not quite there. Serpell is a gifted close reader, and her takes on the Elephant Man, "Psycho," "Grizzly Man," emojis, and other things are original and stimulating. But her larger point... something about how, umm, we're all just objects, and we might as well embrace that fact and have fun with it... always seems slightly out of reach. I guess it makes the whole project sort of tantalizing. Like Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" (if I had to guess, I'd wager that Morrison is Serpell's favorite writer), the emphasis here is on, well, play. Serpell messes with her texts and messes with our brains a bit, and all in all, it's a pretty good experience.

[Unknown · Rating 1 out of 5]

LOOK AT ME
When I saw this on the exam I looked outside and tried to imagine that Skbidi Toilet was there. I tried to reach for Skibidi Toilet but I realized it was just an illusion. It turns out the Skibidi toilet lord does not approve of these hieroglyphics. Skibidi toilet cries "Escape the matrix!". Tralalero tralala on the other hand has a different opinion. After a not so careful consideration, tralalero tralala has decided that he wants to take down this forbidden transfer of knowledge. "LOOK AT ME," he says, applies only to him, the biggest diva of them all. No Namwali or anybody gets to take that away from him.

...and that's when Lirili Larila came in, ready to assert her dominance. As I skimmed the second passages of the text, "LOOK AT ME," I saw an elephant out of the corner of my eye. It was Tung Tung Tung Sahur, possessing the body of Lirili Larila. "Avant-garde," he said, clutching his bombardino-fang sword.