Black on Black
On Our Resilience and Brilliance in America
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
*A Zibby's Most Anticipated Book of 2023*
*A "Next Big Idea Club" Must-Read Book for January*
*An Essence "Books by Black Authors to Read This Winter" Pick*
*An Ebony Entertainment "Required Reading" Book for January*
*A Lambda Literary "Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature" for January*
*A Southern Review of Books Best Book of January*
A piercing collection of essays on racial tension in America and the ongoing fight for visibility, change, and lasting hope
“There are stories that must be told.”
Acclaimed novelist and scholar Daniel Black has spent a career writing into the unspoken, fleshing out, through storytelling, pain that can’t be described.
Now, in his debut essay collection, Black gives voice to the experiences of those who often find themselves on the margins. Tackling topics ranging from police brutality to the AIDS crisis to the role of HBCUs to queer representation in the black church, Black on Black celebrates the resilience, fortitude, and survival of black people in a land where their body is always on display.
As Daniel Black reminds us, while hope may be slow in coming, it always arrives, and when it does, it delivers beyond the imagination. Propulsive, intimate, and achingly relevant, Black on Black is cultural criticism at its openhearted best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Black (Don't Cry for Me) mixes memoir, history, and cultural criticism in these powerful essays on the experiences of being a queer Black person in America. In "When I Was a Boy," Black recalls how he succumbed to the pressure he felt growing up in rural Arkansas to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity ("I soon learned that people wanted unenlightened black boys.... Half-drunk, baby-producing black boys"), until he went to college and "life-changing books found me and restored my senses." Elsewhere, Black analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the Black church, claiming that its historical role providing "poor, disenfranchised black people imaginative context wherein to construct identity and communal value" is undercut by its "ubiquitous patriarchy," antagonism toward Africanist traditions, and insistence that Black people be "‘presentable' before white eyes." Other topics include the effects of white supremacy on self-image; the "historical significance" of the TV show Pose; the "life-altering" experience of attending an HBCU, where many students encounter for the first time "the assumption of their intelligence"; and how James Baldwin became "caught in an interstitial space between black rejection and white objectification." Intimate, wide-ranging, and sharply argued, this is an inspirational call for a more inclusive vision of Black community.
