Black in Blues
How a Color Tells the Story of My People
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A “vast, multifaceted and enchanting” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) meditation on the color blue and its fascinating role in Black history and culture, from National Book Award winner Imani Perry, “the most important interpreter of Black life in our time” (Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.)
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This compelling book by cultural theorist Imani Perry explores the relationship between Black people and the colour blue. And Perry takes that premise in fascinating, unexpected directions. There are sketches of singular people, like a society lady whose fascination with indigo fabric turns her into a self-taught chemist and an upper-class Black Haitian slave owner who becomes one of the architects of his island’s revolution. We learn new things about familiar names, like how agricultural scientist George Washington Carver was also an accomplished painter who invented a colour, Egyptian Blue, that’s still in use today. Other chapters are more poetic, like when Perry equates jazz’s “blue note” with the ability of enslaved people to live as fully realized, three-dimensional people, even under horrific subjugation. It’s hard to tell where each of these vignettes is going next, which is a big part of the book’s singular charm.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award winner Perry (South to America) offers a lyrical meditation on "the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk." Her account reaches back "before Black was a race" to the indigo trade. Early modern Europeans were fascinated by (and covetous of) the blue dye that "doesn't just compel the eye" but "attacks multiple senses" with its aromatic scent and strong texture, Perry writes, while for many Africans "indigo had a spiritual significance" and was employed to induce "balance and harmony." With the coming of the slave trade, "a block of indigo dye could be traded for a ‘hand,' " or human being—a convergence of sacred and profane that Perry uses as a launch point for her ruminations on Blackness and modernity. She points out that even as Black human beings began to be traded for the dye and forced into its cultivation in the Americas, Europeans' medieval description for Africans as "Blew," or blue, fell out of use, as if to erase the connection between Black people and value. Meanwhile, enslaved Africans in the Americas continued to rely on blue's spiritual strength—Perry cites examples such as the folk practice of hanging "cobalt blue" bottles from myrtle trees and the ritual use of bluestone, or copper sulphate, in hoodoo rituals. In direct and intimate prose, Perry synthesizes an impressive range of research into a sinewy, pulsing narrative that positions the past as an active, living force in the present. Readers will be swept up.
