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Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of South to America, as well as seven other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Cambridge with her two sons.
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 *
