With this most important collection, George Yancy and A. Todd Franklin demonstrate what a generative and committed philosophy looks like. The faces of anti-Blackness may have changed since the dreadful days of Jim Crow, but the constant of white hate for Black bodies remains-and this volume enjoins us to reckon with it. Returning to the horrors of Till's lynching but also to his mother's resistant insistence on an open casket compels us to linger on this primal scene of anti-Blackness without ceding to its suffocating totality. Not unlike Mamie Till-Mobley, we must respond to Emmett in critical and inventive ways that jam, unsettle, and de-complete our existing anti-Black world, and this volume is a much-needed companion in that effort.

Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, USA

Emmett Till's lynching, that most grotesque and intentional form of execution, brought into sharp relief the findings and pleas of Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass: anti-Black animus is real, as are modes of resistance to Black unfreedom. Yancy, Franklin, and the volume contributors offer long overdue philosophical examinations of Till's death. They also underscore the actions of Mamie Till-Mobley, a mother whose decision to leave open her son's casket transformed America and continues to impact states experiencing late modern Reconstruction.

Neil Roberts, John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy Professor of Africana Studies, Williams College, USA

Even though you may not feel emotionally ready to engage Open Casket, you must do so because each essay offers the gift of fresh analysis, creativity in its painful remembering, and insightful confrontations of anti-Black racism that spark the kind of political imagination most needed right now.

Traci C. West, James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Ethics and African American Studies, Drew University Theological School, USA, and author of Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence

When Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on the open funeral casket showing how white attackers left her son Emmett's face beaten, slashed and bloated-deformed nearly beyond recognition-she enabled the world to feel the monstrous force that is white anti-blackness. Now, with this book Yancy and Franklin also enable us to think deeply, down into the abyssal rage and lament forged by white anti-blackness. The Open Casket works like a lantern that casts a revelatory blacklight to bring out the brutal features of the white supremacy we often dare not let ourselves see.

Mark Lewis Taylor, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA