eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade.
What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us.
In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781487009885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | House of Anansi Press Inc |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2021 |
| Series: | The CBC Massey Lectures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, ESI EDUGYAN was raised in Calgary, Alberta. She is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Washington Black, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Man Booker Award and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Half-Blood Blues, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. She is also the author of Dreaming of Elsewhere, which is part of the Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series. She has held fellowships in the U.S., Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Read an Excerpt
CONTENTS
- Africa & Science Fiction
The emergence of Afro-Futurism in the last decade has created a new framework to discuss Africa. How does a continent still reckoning with a fractured past envision its many futures, and how are those futures reflected in its art? This piece examines filmmaker Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, an Apartheid allegory in which robots are the despised race; novelist Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, in which Nigerians must contend with a UFO landing; and the fascinating true history of Zambia’s 1960s space program.
- Europe & Portraiture
How have various forms of European portraiture sought to depict people of African descent throughout the ages? How have Black artists engaged with art forms rooted in European traditions? This essay explores Black figures depicted in Dutch, German, and French oil portraiture, seeking to name and contextualize the sitters. Who were these men and women, and how did they situate themselves within cultures in which they were perceived as “other”? Figures discussed include Angelo Solimon, a brilliant Viennese courtier; Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Queen Victoria’s African goddaughter; and George Bridgetower, the violin prodigy for whom Beethoven originally wrote “The Kreutzer Sonatas.”
- America & the Body as Art
The construction of race in America was predicated on arbitrary classifications and a mandate to restrict the social and geographical mobility of people of African descent. Using the classic 1934 Claudette Colbert film Imitation of Life as an entrance, this piece looks at racial passing as a form of resistance to those restrictions on freedom. The essay also examines passing through an opposing perspective, looking at cases of “Blackfishing,” white-to-Black passing, and its fallacy of White Empathy. The piece explores such figures as John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me, Ray Sprigle, Rachel Dolezal, and Jessica Krug.
- Canada & the Western
The West has always represented a terminus in the Canadian imagination: it is where the land gives way to the Pacific, the last “empty” frontier to be “tamed” and absorbed into a seamless nationhood. What are the myths of Western expansion as filtered through Black experiences? How do we seek to depict them in art? This piece explores the myth of the West through late nineteenth and early twentieth century arrivals of Black settlers: the founding of a Black colony on Saltspring Island, British Columbia, as seen through historic photographs; the founding of Amber Valley in Alberta; and the figure of John Ware, Canada’s “first black cowboy.”
- Asia & the Romance
The taboo of Black miscegenation runs deep in the countries of Asia. And yet, cross-cultural exchanges of every kind have taken place for centuries between Asia and Africa. This piece focuses on historical figures of African descent and their encounters with pan-Asian cultures: the story of Pate, an island off the northern coast of Kenya, home to the descendants of Chinese explorers shipwrecked there in the early fifteenth century; the life of Yasuke, the so-called “African Samurai,” whose arrival in late sixteenth century Kyoto literally caused a riot; the Katanga Infanticide in 1970s Congo, an event so horrific many still contend it never happened. The conclusion explores interracial relationships in China’s “Little Africa,” Guanghzhou, and the current-day targeting of Africans for allegedly spreading the Coronavirus.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Europe and the Art of. Seeing 5
Chapter 2 Canada and the Art of Ghosts 43
Chapter 3 America and the Art of Empathy 81
Chapter 4 Africa and the Art of the Future 129
Chapter 5 Asia and the Art of Storytelling 169
Bibliography 211
Acknowledgements 223
Photo Credits 225
Index 227
What People are Saying About This
PRAISE FOR WASHINGTON BLACK
International Bestseller
Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Booker Prize Finalist
Carnegie Medal Finalist
International Dublin Literary Award Finalist
Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Finalist
“Terrifically exciting . . . An engrossing hybrid of 19th-century adventure and contemporary subtlety, a rip-roaring tale of peril imbued with our most persistent strife … Discover what the rest of the world already knows: Edugyan is a magical writer.” — Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Riveting … [A] towering achievement … Edugyan is one of our sharpest and deepest writers of historical fiction.” — David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
“A lush, exhilarating travelogue reminiscent of Jules Verne … Edugyan, like her hero, can paint an indelible scene.” — Laura Miller, The New Yorker
“Gripping … Astonishing … Washington Black’s presence in these pages is fierce and unsettling. His urge to live all he can is matched by his eloquence.” — Colm Toibin, New York Times Book Review
“A wonder of an adventure story, powered by the helium of fantasy, but also by the tender sensibility of its aspiring young hero, Wash Black … Much of the pleasure of reading Washington Black derives from Edugyan’s ingenious storytelling gifts, but her novel is more than just a buoyant bauble … Washington Black is an unconventional and often touching novel about the search for transcendence above categories.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR/Fresh Air
“As harrowing a portrayal of slavery as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, but also a globe-trotting, page-turning adventure story. A historical epic with much to say about the present-day world.” — Justine Jordan, Guardian
“A daring work of empathy and imagination, featuring a Barbados slave boy in the 1830s who flees barbaric cruelty in a hot-air balloon and embarks on a life of adventure that is wondrous, melancholy, and strange.” — New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Exquisite.” — Boris Kachka, New York magazine
“A full-pelt adventure story featuring hot-air balloon crashes, blizzards in the Arctic, scientific discovery, knife fights in dark alleys, bounty hunters, and forbidden romance, it has the seemingly old-fashioned qualities of being gripping and plot-driven, as well as a novel of ideas … Surprisingly uplifting.” — Francesca Angelini, The Times (London)
“Magnificent … By placing a black slave at the heart and centre of this epic romp, by making Wash the explorer of lands, science and art, Edugyan reclaims long-lost terrain in this ambitious, head-spinning work.” — Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
“A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free.” — Vanity Fair
“Masterful … Wondrous … Gripping … Edugyan’s depiction of this dark period is vivid and captivating. [She] is too subtle a novelist to belabour her story’s contemporary relevance, but, like the moral stain of human bondage, it is palpable all the same. At a time when blackness still invites unwarranted violence, young Wash’s hard lessons resonate.” — The Economist
PRAISE FOR HALF-BLOOD BLUES
International Bestseller
Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011
Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist
An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year
“Unforgettable … Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed. It’s a work that promises to lead black literature in a whole new direction.” — Globe and Mail
“A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal … [A] brilliantly fast-moving novel.” — The Times
“Shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism … Truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang.” — The Independent
“Ingenious.” — Daily Telegraph
“Destined to win a wide audience … Deftly paced in incident and tone, moving from scenes of snappy dialogue, in which band members squabble and banter humorously, to tense, atmospheric passages of description … Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly-imagined story … Half-Blood Blues itself represent a kind of flowering — that of a gifted storyteller.” — Toronto Star
This sensitive exploration of racialized people brings ghosts of erased lives out from the shadows and lays them on top of one another in a double exposure of how othering functions in our lives. It performs a kind of haunting, throwing tender light on the fictions that divide us.