Black Cool
One Thousand Streams of Blackness
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
All About Love author bell hooks and other innovative Black thinkers explore ‘coolness’ within Black culture, in this 10th anniversary edition of Rebecca Walker’s visonary essay collection.
“[This] slim anthology gives itself a formidable task: pinning down the elusive definitions of ‘Black Cool,’ an aesthetic and a philosophy that echoes across the African diaspora.” —The Atlantic
Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world.
Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more.
Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond. With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including:
• Visual artist Hank Willis Thomas
• Writer and filmmaker dream hampton
• MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey
• Fashion legend Michaela Angela Davis
• Critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks
This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the slenderness of this collection of essays on the zen of cool by several influential cultural visionaries, Walker (Black, White and Jewish) knows how to approach a fashionable theme from all angles. After an informed foreword by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., the various commentaries on the fundamentals and potential of this African-American cultural export domestically and globally are written by such trendsetters as writer Mat Johnson, performing artist Staceyann Chin, critic Dream Hampton, photographer Dawoud Bey, writer Veronica Chambers, essayist Miles Marshall Lewis, critic Margo Jefferson, fashion maven Michaela Angela Davis, and educator-activist bell hooks. Three of the standouts are Chamber's "Hunger," Chin's "Authenticity," and hooks's "Forever," where elements of the personal give meaning to the topic and touch the reader in a significant way. While Hampton discusses "Audacity" as mastering fear and Bey explains "Swagger" as "a way to reclaim and celebrate viscerally an aspect of self that has historically eroded," Lewis pays tribute in "Always Evoking" to the sound sorcerer Miles Davis, a musician of the cool sound whose constant mode was change. Walker and her band of scribes are in top form, giving a rich, varied picture of Black cool style at its most frosty.
