Stranger Faces

Look at me.

Stranger Faces takes this instruction as its starting point. If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the most crucial locus of human relation. The face—what we ask each other to engage with when we say look at me—means identity, truth, feeling, beauty, authenticity, humanity. It underlies our beliefs about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. All of this—ontology, affect, aesthetics, ethics—rests on a specific version or image of the face. We might call it the ideal face. But what about the face that attracts and repels recognition, the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces as they appear in life and art—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of dead—Serpell probes our mythology of the face and invites us to consider a new ethics based on their very mutability and the pleasure we take in them.

Stranger Faces is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.