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Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
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About This Book
A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong's question, "What did I do to be so Black and blue?" In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world's favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as "Blue Black." The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon. Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.
Reviews
"What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience ..."
"Black and blue are brilliant and so is Black in Blues."
"An innovative cultural history."
"What's compelling, when and where Perry peers inside of the familiar, through her black and blue lens, to provide us new ways of looking at it, is that the two concepts have become inseparable ..."
"It will have you looking afresh even at your corner mailbox."
"I admire...Perry's writing, its breadth and movement, the way that it, too, stretches and sings."
"The sheer breadth and depth of this mosaic telling speaks to the power of Perry's craft as both scholar and storyteller, illustrating the beauty of the very culture about which she writes."
"It is a contrapuntal document, musical and moving, and no less rich for its tumbling abundance."
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