Black in Blues

Reviews / Votes

This prismatic volume finds the National Book Award-winning Princeton professor meditating on skin color and the indigo trade, Louis Armstrong's music and Toni Morrison's writing, in short, lyrical chapters * New York Times * An affective investigation into the many roles of blueness in Black life. . . it is full of archival gems - but it is also a lyrical [work]. . . . What unites its disparate contents is a mood, which is just as valuable as an argument. It is a contrapuntal document, musical and moving, and no less rich for its tumbling abundance * Washington Post * As Imani Perry illuminates in a new book that swirls and flicks like an actual marble, [blue is] inextricable from the Black race. . . . Reading Black in Blues is like putting on a pair of those special Kodak 3-D viewfinders that make objects and issues leap suddenly into focus. . . . Its chapters are tide pools: quite short, but deep and teeming. . . . It will have you looking afresh even at your corner mailbox * New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) * One of those books that slips the boundaries . . . . 'Ask the right questions,' [Perry] insists, 'and you'll move toward virtue and truth.' Words to live by, especially in a nation where a large swatch of the population seems intent on disavowing the better angels of our nature * Los Angeles Times * Touching on a range of historical, artistic, musical, and literary references-from the color's significance in Yoruba cosmology to the blue candles used in hoodoo rituals to the 'tremor' of the 'blue note'-Perry illuminates how the color has been variously associated with mourning, spiritual strength, and forces of freedom and oppression * New Yorker, 'Briefly Noted' * Revelatory. . . .[Black in Blues] is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness-and we would all do well to listen * Atlantic * It is clear from reading Imani Perry's Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People why she is adept at chronicling the history of the Black diaspora: She weaves stories like a village griot or a grandparent sitting on the porch recalling the past. . . . From Africans dressed in blue as if it were ceremonial garb to a tiny house in Alabama and a cloth of remembrance for a loved one, black and blue are brilliant and so is Black in Blues * Christian Science Monitor * Vast, multifaceted and enchanting. . . . Black in Blues also gave me a renewed sense of direction, a clarity of purpose. Here it is: Hold fast to beauty. It has everything you need. It has everything we need * Minnesota Star Tribune * A meditative and healing introspection on Black history presented through a fresh and innovative lens. . . . Innovative, melancholic, and expansive, Black in Blues achieves its goal to bring Black history to life * Atlanta Journal Constitution * Scholar Imani Perry is a brilliant storyteller and cultural critic. Black in Blues offers a historical analysis of Black identity through the lens of color. She examines how the color blue beautifully reflects the Black lived experience in America * TODAY.com *