The Strangers
Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:19th Sep '24
£20.00
This title is due to be published on 19th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home.
In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type.
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask?
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.
My world would be less rich without the extraordinary presence of Ekow Eshun. This book will be referenced for years to come. The stranger is hidden in every word on every page of this work, and it is a relief to finally meet him face to face, at the book’s climax, in all his winged and magnificent luminosity -- Lemn Sissay
ISBN: 9780241472026
Dimensions: 240mm x 156mm x 28mm
Weight: 500g
288 pages