An innovative cultural history.
The power of a color.
National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. “Blues are our sensibility,” she writes. She begins her wide-ranging history with the production of indigo in the 16th century. Coveted throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, the dye was so valuable that a block of indigo could be traded for an enslaved person. Imported from West Africa to America, the planting and processing of indigo became tasks for the enslaved. Although the work was arduous, the color, Perry notes, “remained a source of pleasure,” and enslaved people used the dye for their own walls, doors, porches, and clothing. The color also became associated with mourning, with blue periwinkles marking the graves of the enslaved and cobalt blue bottles hung from myrtle trees to mark people’s passing. The melancholy sound of “a blued note” infused Black music with a quality “so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Miles Davis’ albums Blue Period and Kind of Blue, Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue, Roberta Flack’s Blue Lights in the Basement, Duke Ellington’s composition “Crescendo in Blue,” and Mongo Santamaría’s song “Afro Blue” are among many of Perry’s musical references. Literary references abound as well: Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. The “precocious girl-child Indigo,” Perry writes, “was me.” If blue has signaled Black agency—Haitian rebels wore blue uniforms—it also conveys oppression: “The blue uniform is a metonym for the enforcement arm of the state,” Perry notes, and has become shorthand for police power.
An innovative cultural history.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780062977397
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
PROFILES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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