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.
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.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Sep 28, 2021 |
| Specifications | 248 pages | 5.25 in x 8 in 248 pages | 5 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | washington black; barack obama; slavery; university of toronto; racism; black lives matter; civil rights; art history; african studies; canadian literature; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
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. |
| Written By |
|
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. |
[Esi Edugyan] explores with empathy what it means to be seen, and who remains unseen, in our current identity-conscious, visibility-obsessed culture that seems to be limping toward a new aesthetic order and politics of power.
” —New York TimesIn its breadth, beauty, and candour, this is a beguiling collection. And if, after reading it you leave with more questions than you started — which might be a complaint in a lesser book — then I suspect it has achieved its aim.
” —GuardianThese stories soar off the page with Edugyan’s poetic, personally informed narration … Out of the Sun provides an enlightening, multifaceted, and thoroughly engrossing look at what Blackness means and has meant through the centuries.
” —Irish TimesDistinguished by its erudite yet unpretentious prose and probing viewpoints, this is an essential reckoning with how history is made.
” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEWA perfect blend of memoir and thought, pop culture and philosophy … Edugyan’s work is masterful and essential.
” —Miramichi ReaderThis 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.
” —Tessa McWatt, author of Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging