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 philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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