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.
[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.
In 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.
These 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.
Distinguished by its erudite yet unpretentious prose and probing viewpoints, this is an essential reckoning with how history is made.
