Scan barcode
A review by longcommutelit
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
4.0
To observe and to write and to convince people to look more deeply is an act of love, and it is difficult to find a love as loud as Abdurraqib's.
A question that came up in conversation was whether Hanif Abdurraqib's essays convince you of (for lack of a better dichotomy) universal truths or personal truths. That is to say, when he writes essays about the significance of something, is it simply his own personal appraisals and experiences that tell you a person or a place or a moment have a deeper significance?
At times, the answer is yes--this book especially. But in a paradoxical manner, this is the way Abdurraqib brings these subjects closer to all of us. Schoolyard fights and hot spades games in the back of the van and his mother's anger are mirrored with performers and songs and cultural phenomena with the thesis that what can be consumed so passively sometimes, or so superficially, might always means something. And particularly, in Black performance, it is so, so often easy to forget that in a world that has separated artists from the people that they are.
A question that came up in conversation was whether Hanif Abdurraqib's essays convince you of (for lack of a better dichotomy) universal truths or personal truths. That is to say, when he writes essays about the significance of something, is it simply his own personal appraisals and experiences that tell you a person or a place or a moment have a deeper significance?
At times, the answer is yes--this book especially. But in a paradoxical manner, this is the way Abdurraqib brings these subjects closer to all of us. Schoolyard fights and hot spades games in the back of the van and his mother's anger are mirrored with performers and songs and cultural phenomena with the thesis that what can be consumed so passively sometimes, or so superficially, might always means something. And particularly, in Black performance, it is so, so often easy to forget that in a world that has separated artists from the people that they are.