A celebration of Black culture beyond the white gaze, by one of America's most talked-about young cultural critics
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by BuzzFeed, Esquire, NPR, O- The Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. His most recent book, Go Ahead in the Rain- Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list.
Hanif Abdurraqib's genius is in pinpointing those moments in
American cultural history when Black people made lightning strike.
But Black performance, Black artistry, Black freedom too often came
at devastating price. The real devil in America is America itself,
the one who stole the soul that he, through open eyes and fearless
prose, snatches back. This is searing, revelatory, filled with
utter heartbreak, and unstoppable joy.
*Marlon James, author of Black Leopard Red Wolf*
A rapturous exploration of black genius. Whether heralding unsung
entertainers or re-examining legends, Hanif Abdurraqib weaves
together gorgeous essays that reveal the resilience, heartbreak,
and joy within black performance. I read this book
breathlessly.
*author of The Vanishing Half*
To read Hanif Abdurraqib is to be embraced in the middle of chaos.
In his latest book, A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black
Performance, he does what many great writers do, which is to
illuminate and join the dots between connections readers may once
have failed to see.
*Huck*
Abdurraqib is one of the most brilliant writers I've ever read. A
Little Devil In America needs to be on every bedside table, every
high school and college desktop - and basically, in this age of a
revolution, this is that ONE book that everyone needs to read. Pure
genius. I'm not even trying to get at even SOME of the brilliance
Hanif gets to with this book-there is just too much. From Black
Exceptionalism to Josephine Baker to Old Heads-he brings it and
clarifies it, then shapes it into every bit of medicine we need
right now.
*author of Red at the Bone*
Poignant, powerful, candid, written with sincerity and emotion ...
An important book
*New York Times*
The most important cultural critic in America right now? This
writer gets my vote. Abdurraqib has delivered a winner.
*Chicago Tribune*
Hanif Abdurraqib has a way of taking slices of our cultural
landscape, examining them, and transforming them into observations
and analyses that leave me underlining the entire page. In A Little
Devil In America, Abdurraqib brilliantly braids together history,
criticism, and prose so stunning that it makes you want to read
every word out loud just so you can hear its music. Everything
Abdurraqib writes is a must-read, but this is his best yet. It is
one of the most dynamic books I have ever read.
*Clint Smith*
Blending pop-culture essays, memoir, and poetry, A Little Devil in
America delves into the manyiterations of Black artistic expression
through an often deeply personal lens ...Startling, layered, and
timely, this is an essential, illuminating collection
*Booklist (starred review)*
A thoughtful memoir rolled into a set of joined essays on life,
death, and the Black experience in America... Social criticism, pop
culture, and autobiography come together neatly in these pages, and
every sentence is sharp, provocative, and self-aware ... A
winner.
*Kirkus Reviews (*starred review*)*
A Little Devil in America is so so heavy in some places that I have
to take breaks. It just hurts to read some of these truths, woven
in such beautiful writing.
*Yomi Sode*
In this staggeringly intimate meditation, Abdurraqib shines a light
on how Black artists have shaped-and been shaped by-American
culture. His prose is reliably razor-sharp. Filled with nuance and
lyricism, Abdurraqib's luminous survey is stunning.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
Abdurraqib pens respectful, heartwarming essays that reflect on
giants in music, television, cinema, and even magic...his stories
will inspire and provoke thoughtful meditations on how Black lives
matter in all areas of life and art.
*Library Journal (starred review)*
Abdurraqib uses his inimitable blend of incisive, piercing
criticism and shimmering stream-of-consciousness to explore
everything from the problem with praising Black women for being
"vessels" who have "saved America" with their votes (he points out:
"It occurred to me that Black women were simply attempting to save
themselves") to Dave Chappelle's appeal to white audiences to the
death of his mother. Moving, provocative, and infused with a
singular lyricism, A Little Devil in America is an exultant blend
of memoir and criticism, a must-read for anyone looking to better
understand this country and its people.
*Refinery29*
It's an absolutely brilliant book from a critic who's become one of
the country's most essential writers... To call Abdurraqib anything
less than one of the best writers working in America, and to call
this book anything less than a masterpiece, would be doing him, and
literature as a whole, a disservice
*Minneapolis Star Tribune*
These 'notes in praise of Black performance' encompass dance,
music, film, and standup, along with everyday affectations and
embodiments of masculinity, fear, intimacy, and belonging. Subjects
include Josephine Baker, Michael Jackson, blackface, "Soul Train,"
and brotherhood. ...Combines meditations on personal
experiences-losing his mother, navigating the Midwestern punk
scene-with affectionate studies of cultural moments and figures,
beloved and under-sung alike. Abdurraqib views performance as an
expression of life and a means of survival
*The New Yorker*
[Abdurraqib] has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not
just a poet's lyricism and imagery but also a scholar's rigor, a
novelist's sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker's
impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until
something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to
think or even react differently
*Bookforum*
A book that brims with wonder and introspection while also honoring
the significance and contributions of so many of the lives within
it. Abdurraqib's passions are fully on display, and his widespread
love is infectious in the best way possible, resulting in a
masterwork that will not only move readers but will also send them
off into their own personal rabbit holes of joy and wonder. This
is, perhaps, the greatest gift a writer can give to his readers,
and A Little Devil in America delivers it in spades
*The Daily Beast*
contemplative and scholarly... it is a joy to watch [Hanif's] mind
work. In his new collection of interconnected essays, the
author...excavates the bits of pop culture that often get paved
over by white supremacy and our collective short-term memory. As
for the parts we think we know - Abdurraqib has lots to say about
Whitney Houston, Dave Chappelle, Green Book, Altamont, and more -
it's his pointed and frequently personal re-examinations that set A
Little Devil soaring
*The Philadelphia Inquirer*
A vibrant showcase of sharp writing, Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in
America attests that Black performance at its root is not simply an
outward show of talent but also a means of survival. Read
carefully. Abdurraqib's book is a challenge not to accept the usual
explanations for the performances we witness.
*BookPage*
Abdurraqib's great strength is his ability to present broad, canny
observations through the lens of his personal experience, and his
intimate exploration of what these specific moments meant to him as
a Black Muslim coming of age in the US is what lingers long after
you've finished the book
*Buzzfeed*
Abdurraqib has written a profound reflection on how Black
performance is woven into the fabric of American culture... A
Little Devil in America is a joyous ode to Black performance
throughout history.
*PureWow*
Throughout, Abdurraqib writes with urgency as he highlights what
these performances mean, how they connect to his own feelings on
grief, love and life,
and where they fit into American history.
*TIME Magazine*
From Josephine Baker to Soul Train to 'Sixteen Ways of Looking at
Blackface,' Abdurraqib takes us on a wild ride through the history
of Black performances, artists who crushed boundaries and carved
out spaces for vigorous forms of African American expression. His
is an intimate, conspiratorial voice, musically inflected, blending
scholarship with anecdote, a 'waltz in a circular chamber of your
homies and not-homies, shouting chants of excitement.'
*Oprah Magazine*
Abdurraqib breathes new life into performers of significance in his
life, both legendary and unsung
*A.V. Club*
Abdurraqib is one of our finest writers period. A brilliant poet,
essayist and cultural critic, he handles nostalgia, pop culture,
Blackness and friendship in ways few writers can. Here, he examines
Black America's changing views of Whitney Houston, the death of
Michael Jackson, the spiritual properties of dancing, Afrofuturism
and more. The early chapter "Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface"
is a deeply humane piece of virtuoso writing. Longer dispatches are
broken up by lyric, stream-of-consciousness pieces that refresh the
soul and remind readers that there's little Abdurraqib can't do
*Columbia Star Tribune*
In his new collection of essays, A Little Devil in America, the
poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib surveys this sprawl of expression.
Here he charges himself with quite an ambitious task, pinning down
and contextualizing the historic scale of such a globally
significant cultural output, and it is one that would appear to
call for an equally ambitious scope... Contemplations of legendary
voices, sleights of hand, and charismatic choreographies are in
dialogue with his own stories of grief, love, faith, and the search
for freedom within the confinements of borders and a
body...Abdurraqib expands the conception of "performance" to
include the whole realm of behavior and culture...Playfulness,
seduction, artistry, and reinvention: Abdurraqib wants us to know
that these devilish gestures have their place, too, among the
saints that line the corridors in this tiresome, captivating, and
essential struggle
*The Nation*
In A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib walks readers through
Black archives of dance, film, social struggle, and song as though
these "intimate histories" of performance (as Saidiya Hartman calls
them) could free us from anything that misses the beat. For this
collection of essays, he does the work of a DJ: he digs through the
crates, selects the most appropriately unexpected
songs/topics/subjects, builds a collage between cuts and scratches,
and presents his set. His books are soundscapes in print, and I was
somehow listening to each sentence as if it were a breakbeat of
personal narrative and socio-historical commentary...Hanif is one
of the most exciting writers of his generation
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Abdurraqib, known for his playful, intelligent sense of humor on
Twitter, highlights amazing performances that shed light on
societal constructions and moments of sheer joy his book about
Black culture in America. Writing about joy is challenging; falling
back on cliche is a constant temptation that Abdurraqib avoids in
this insightful tome
*Forbes*
That sense of limitlessness wraps itself around every essay in
Abdurraqib's newest book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in
Praise of Black Performance. In it, he writes about Black
performance in America-from Great Depression-era dance marathons to
the enduring cool of Don Cornelius to the art of Mike Tyson
entering a boxing ring-with both great reverence and rigorous
analysis. The book, in the way Abdurraqib's work so often does,
erects monuments to our should-be legends and our unignorable icons
alike, and paints an expansive, deeply felt portrait of the history
of Black artistry
*Electric Literature*
This deft consideration of seemingly irreconcilable values, between
the personal and private dimensions of performance, can be found
throughout the essays in A Little Devil in America...Abdurraqib
sees performance as a site of radical questioning, experimentation,
and dream-making. This book is not a work of theory. It is sensual.
We watch him watching his idols and we watch him dancing along with
them, sometimes clumsily. If Brooks's goal is to make a case for
performers' intellectualism, Abdurraqib's is to help us understand
how they teach us to live richer, more embodied lives
*Vulture*
Engrossing and moving ... A new, poetic take on essays that, I
think, changes the game in many ways.
*New Statesman Books of the Year*
Astonishing, impressive ... the connections he makes point to the
enduring influence of Black art ... a book as bold as it is
essential
*TIME Book of the Year*
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