Black Paper
Writing in a Dark Time
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form.
“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t.
Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this erudite collection of observations written over the past three years, art historian Cole (Known and Strange Things) meditates on art, identity, politics, and literature to decipher "the fractured moment in our history." The title (a reference in part to the way old-fashioned carbon paper was used to bring words to life) hints at the varied topics to follow, which—in two dozen essays that span travelogue, autobiography, and family memoir—"collectively argue for the urgency of using our senses... to respond to experience... and intensify our ethical commitments." In his search for light in the darkness that consumed the time between 2016 and 2019, Cole zeroes in on the work of Italian painter Caravaggio, who wrung inspiration from life's less pleasant aspects and turned "profound grief" into an "astonishing achievement" with his Entombment of Christ (1603–1604); and Black culture's paradoxical power to bridge the divide between the "colonial hangover" of Africa and "American experiences of slavery." Elsewhere, he challenges the Joycean interpretation of the term epiphany, asking readers not to see it as a "narrative device" in which all of one's problems are patly solved by "flashes of insight," but instead as an opening of one's consciousness. Offering a window into his articulate worldview, Cole brings into sharp relief the very humanity he seeks.
