A Little Devil in America is an exhilarating work of cultural criticism by a multifaceted and original talent. In prose poetry and essay Hanif Abdurraqib addresses an impressive range of topics related to culture and identity. Some of these could have become cliché in lesser hands—the life-giving necessity of Black joy, problematic presentations of Black pain, the limitations of representation— but even those he makes new, offering new language, and more importantly, new insight.

“...there is no church like the church of unchained arms being thrown in every direction…”

This is my first time reading Hanif Abdurraqib and I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY.

I have already added all of Abdurraqib’s collections to my TBR because I need more.

A Little Devil in America is an essay collection, a poem, a song, centered around all aspects of Black performance; on the stage, on the screen, in life.

This is Abdurraqib’s declaration of love for music, art, his family, his people.

The essay ‘Give Merry Clayton Her Roses’ left me speechless and listening to Gimme Shelter on repeat for hours; sending chills up and down my spine starting at the 2:48 mark every. single. time.

In ‘On Going Home as Performance’, Abdurraqib recalls when Michael Jackson died, Aretha Franklin's Homegoing, his own mother’s Homegoing.

From dance marathons to Soul Train, Whitney to Beyoncé, Sammy Davis Jr. to Don Shirley, (I could goon) Abdurraqib gives us a detailed history of Black art and seamlessly weaves it with deep personal reflections from his own life and what it means to be Black in America.

Thank you Random House & NetGalley for the e-ARC.

This book is very interesting to compare to the author's other book of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. That one had so. many incredibly rich, small essays, very poetic, and in this book, the essays have much more room, weaving in and out of topics on the same theme like classical music. At first I missed the compactness of his prior writing, but I came to appreciate these essays in how they could be doing so many things at once, being funny and sad, personal and political, intensely considered but not overwrought. I often had to stop the book to pull up a youtube video or a song, and I just loved the reading experience. I'll read anything Hanif writes. Highlights were the essays covering Black people in outer space, Josephine Baker, Whitney Houston, and Merry Clayton.

One of Hanif Abdurraqib's best. I'm still thinking about Whitney Houston, Josephine Baker and Merry Clayton weeks later. Would love for my students to read this

Thank you to Random House & NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available March 3o 2021!

"A Little Devil In America" is Hanif Abduqurraqib's latest foray into cultural critique and it is a doozy. Blending the personal and political, art and history, entertainment and critical race theory, Abduquarraqib paints a candid portrait of Black life in America. With a wide range of subjects- anyone from Josphine Baker to Mike Tyson to Don Shirley to his Cleaveland barbershop, Abduqurraqib discusses how America both exploits and adores its Black people with a poignant and discerning eye. What I love the most is the Poetic language in this book, it feels very much like a conversation with an eccentric friend, the words flow off the page and land softly in your ear and leave deafening impact in your brain.

Hell yes. A celebration, an homage, a joyful piece of art all itself that manages to delight in the joy of other pieces of art. I love the way Hanif's brain works and this book is a true blessing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC of this title.

I was already a fan of Hanif Abdurraqib's work - Pitchfork's praise of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us put him onto my radar, and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest really made me a fan, even when I wasn't familiar with the group he was writing about. A Little Devil in America is a book where I made a note to pick up a physical copy midway through reading the galley so that I could loan it to friends.

As its subtitle notes, this is a collection of essays (and the wonderful things Hanif does across his work that aren't quite essays and aren't fully poems either, but are clearly written with a poet's perspective) focusing on different aspects of black performance. This starts with Soul Train lines, does a fantastic detour into the complicated history of blackface, and continues to go so many wonderful places, from Afrofuturism, to Whitney Houston's inability to dance, to the everyday. I finished this and almost immediately wanted to go back to the beginning to read it again.

As somebody who is a recovering academic and who, in a former life, spent a bulk of her time studying performance, I could not be more grateful to have had the opportunity to read this book. It as masterpiece, tackling an increasingly important subject that often is underrepresented when we think about performance. This will be praised as a seminal work when in the future we have dialogue on Black performance.

I will be featuring on my IG and will post a link to my IG review closer to pub date.

People tell stories with their movement. When people dance together, there are stories of celebration that manifest in the form of rhythmic motion; when two people fight, there is a story of anger, perhaps fear, contained within each punch, grapple, and kick. These individual movements don’t simply tell individual stories, they are connected to a collective history that expresses common themes and truths of an entire people. It’s this collective history of movement that writer, poet, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib uses as the foundation of his latest, career-best book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.


Abdurraqib is one of America’s most fascinating writers. The way he weaves poetry, essay, and memoir into a cohesive literary work hooks and entrances readers as they discover the ways he links together his life, culture, and the material realities of oppressed people in the United States. Perhaps his most historical and sociological work to date, A Little Devil in America traces the history of Black movement, from dancing to boxing to flying to the moon to playing a game of spades, and reflects on the personal and political implications of what it means to be Black in these moments.

Something I always say about Abdurraqib’s writing — since the first time I read him — is he has the ability to make you care about events, artists, bodies of work, etc. that you may not have otherwise thought about. When he expatiates on the connection between Black people and the concept of space, expressing lucidly how the appearance of LaBelle, decked out in futuristic space suits, would set the trend for American fashion’s obsession with the future by the end of the 1970s, I found myself looking up any video I could find of the group, eventually settling on their appearance on Soul Train in 1974. In these few minutes, I found myself invested in these women, as they sang and danced to Lady Marmalade, in ways I never would have considered on any other day.

A Little Devil in America is full of these moments of Black performance — with all of its many meanings — and all of these moments have a role to play in Abdurraqib’s journey through life in America. Make no mistake, this is a book Abdurraqib wrote for Black people, and these snapshots of his life and the history of the Black people whose movement narrates it to this day are inextricably linked to Black identity in America. In a country that has appropriated, exploited, and feared the movement of Black Americans, Abdurraqib writes a love letter of solidarity with his people, whose movement is still taken from them.

If, as Basquiat, art is how we decorate space and music is how we decorate time, then perhaps writing is how we decorate memory. And no one’s writing does that quite the way Hanif Abdurraqib’s does.

His writing somehow feels tangible, words crafted and woven in a such a way as to provoke Stendhal syndrome. Often, I found myself breathless after a sentence, in complete awe of his language. It’s not just that his prose carries the cadence of poetry —“I want, instead, to fill my hands with whatever beauty I can steal from all of your best moments”—, it’s that it is an experience. His sentences weave moments out of everything that is intangible, and what can also be touched.

This one took me a while to read, because I had to savour it, experience it as much as I could. I found myself pausing to listen or watch what Abdurraqib referenced, with reverence; A Little Devil in America gave me memories of moments I hadn’t lived before, like live performances in a time before I was alive, the height of Soul Train, the loud shouts at a massive concert, all through the very personal and intimate lens of Abdurraqib himself.

A Little Devil in America is an archive, collected with love and anger and more love. And it is beautiful.

This is a delicious collection of essays that cover art, music, dance, and much more to chart the significance of Black Performance in American culture. Abdurraqib's writing is beautiful, lyrical, and personal. I am a huge fan of his writing, and was not disappointed by this new collection. I highly recommend this book when it comes out in March!

These essays are so damn good. The sentences are gorgeous. The arguments are unique. He’s writing about music and dance and cultural moments in this way that's so rich and evocative. Which I think has gotta be hard. There’s an essay about Merry Clayton & “Gimme Shelter” and how he describes this song we all know gives the whole thing new life and resonance. He sees and lifts the complexity of Blackness. He delves into grief. There’s so much good here.

Whew. This book.

This book is masquerading as a book of essays, when it is a love letter to a people. It is a song, a poem, and a dance.

I ate this book up slowly. Because as much as I wanted to devour it, I knew I would be sad when it was done. So I savoured it like none other.

Maybe I’m not telling you about this book the way you’d expect in a review. I don’t really care about that right now. I want you to know this is a book that made me feel the author’s love for music, for art, for family, for people. I want you to read this book to experience the way it’s written. I want you to take a moment to live with this book. This is a book of life, and you don’t know what’s coming in life, you just know you’re alive and it’s happening. That’s how I want you to go into this book.

Wow - I have always been a fan of Hanif Abdurraqib, but this is his best yet. His book is incredibly well written and thought out, and I learned so much of history from it. His language is precise yet poetic, and each essay conveys a specific message and knowledge to the reader concisely. It is a perfect amalgamation of lyricism, art history, and non-fiction writing. I absolutely recommend this book when it comes out in March!

Abdurraqib’s writing was already pretty damn great, but unsurprisingly, it turns out when you give him a broad prompt (in this case, black performance), no real restrictions, and let him go off, you get a stunning collection. Essays range from the grief of his mother’s death and how he and his brother experienced it, love, the Wu Tang Clan, and how men are allowed to express love; to dance marathons and Soul Train; to blackface, the 2016 election and people pretending to be Black on Twitter, Rachel D-what’s-her-face; to what the role of movies like the Green Book and Remember the Titans and Crash actually play in the racial discourse in America; to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance and the role he played in a job he had at a health care startup. And that’s just my top five essays of about twenty in here! This comes out at the end of March, absolutely pick it up when it does.

Beautifully written a lyrical story words that brings music to your heart.The author has a beautiful style of writing sharing his life his love of music to the pages.Thisvis another special book I will be adding to my library,#netgalley#randomhouse

Gifted writers can make prose shine like poetry. Abdurraqib is such a writer. Each word feels precisely plucked to convey deep emotions that register the weight of history as well as introspection. He presents individual Black entertainers and discusses their contributions to society and threads each essay with personal anecdotes that display a vulnerability hard-won through deep reflection. From James Brown to Wu Tang Clan, Abdurraqib charts the many debts American culture owes to its most prolific Black artists, and invites the reader to examine what makes them great, and what makes them human.

Abdurraqib is a master of what he does. This book manages to merger history, criticism and memoir in a seamless fashion, showing us that popular culture and our lives are inextricably linked.

Abdurraqib's poetic gift comes through in his prose, compelling you to alternate between sitting, and letting sentences roll around in your head as you contemplate their meaning and beauty, and voraciously plowing ahead to read more.

The thing I hate about reading one of his books is that it serves as a reminder that once this one is done, the wait begins for the next one.

Simply put this collection of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib is spectacular. A five star read so bright, it's blinding. It is unapologetically and blatantly Black. A collection filled with the emotion and vulnerability that African Americans need to express. Part memoir, history book and love letter, A Little Devil in America takes you through Five Movements that are linked by well researched moments of black performance in America and the relationship between then, now and the possibility of tomorrow. Be prepared to pause while reading so that you can Google the photos and scenes he beautifully describes. It's as if I doubted the accuracy and had to witness it for myself or see if I would be as moved as he. Unfamiliar with Mr. Abdurraqib's work, this was a treat to consume and a fitting introduction that compelled me to digest more of his remarkable catalogue. Lastly, I love the cover!

Another music focused book after the author's earlier They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. A true music lover and connoisseur, Abdurraqib writes descriptively about music with precision and love. A little time traveling love story about performance and culture.