This was a really fascinating and thought provoking series of essays in which Edugyan examines how black people appear in art and history in different areas of the world. I particularly enjoyed the second section which looked at the ghostly history of Canada. There are aspects of memoir here, art history and narrative history and I found the writing really accessible. Overall I thought this was a compelling read and I would definitely recommend it.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I enjoyed this a lot! Musings on narratives, history, art, myths and ghosts. All from a perspective of black people/black experience.

I do feel Edugyan has a tendency sometimes to insert paragraphs that feels a bit like her playing ‘devils advocate’ a la ‘this is what some other people might say’. As a rule I personally find that unnecessary and annoying - also in essay collections. This, however, in no way changes the fact that I think a lot of people would find joy in reading this short and easily accessible essay collection!

This was a truly powerful and important piece of non fiction by Esi Edugyan. A book that delves into racism, the way as a society we seem to just not recognise black talent, don’t really get the chance to let people of colours art shine. Well edugyan is changing that with this book. After reading this book I made sure to check out each of the artists mentioned some I had heard some I hadn’t and wow was they beautiful art

A collection of essays exploring black lives that history has failed to record. Each essay is framed against a different continent and looks at identity.

This collection is thought provoking and well written. There was definitely a lot to unpack and think about with these. It looked at identity and race through some really interesting lenses, in particular I liked the first essay which looked at European art and portraits.

The collection fit together really well and the essays flowed. The writing was beautiful and really impactful.

AD - This copy was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Out of the Sun is a really accessible, nuanced and fascinating collection of essays that mix history, cultural criticism and memoir into a beautiful blend of thought-provoking writing. The essays all discuss race in some way but beyond that they’re very different, engaging with subjects that I haven’t seen much discussed before such as the racial dimension of ghost stories and historical relations between Africa and East Asia. Edugyan roots her essays in personal experience, often starting with a story from her life and expanding into multiple avenues that branch off from the original thought without ever losing direction. She owns the contradictions and uncertainties found in these complicated issues instead of insisting she has all the answers, which is really refreshing. This book is easy to read but never over-simplified, overall intriguing and well worth a read.

I loved this book! At moments it got a bit repetitive but overall I learned so much. I particularly enjoyed the discussions of art and race, as well as learning more about the impact of colonisation.

What an excellent collection. Each of the essays have different and unique subjects, but the collection does feel cohesive. The writing is great and captivating; the thoughts and ideas that Esi Edugyan discusses in this book broadened my mind and made me think in ways I hadn't thought of certain things before. My favourite essay was probably the first one, "Europe and the Art of Seeing", because I love reading about art and its influence - I thought it was so interesting to read about the (in)visibility of Black people in European art of a certain time and how this does or doesn't line up with the reality and history of that time. Will definitely buy this when it comes out, this feels like a collection that will provide new insights upon reading and reading again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Serpent's Tail for a free readers copy in exchange for a review.

This seemingly disparate collection of essays covers a wide range of ground in the exploration of Black lives throughout history, with particular reference to their absence from historical record, artistic representation, and how this impacts our wider cultural consciousness. Moving from the Black figures of European portraiture to Afrofuturism to the shock her own face caused on a trip to China, Edugyun interrogates the experiences of black lives concealed throughout various points in history and what this means for the way we understand the world now. By looking at whose stories are not told, and the gaps in which these hidden lives might be glimpsed, she offers thoughtful insights into this lost history and how these absences cast a shadow over our cultural narratives.
Exploring themes such as art, migration, identity and storytelling, Edugyun weaves personal reflections and memoir throughout. Her writing is both tender and sharp as she speculates on the lives we will never get to know and what that means for contemporary lives searching for a lost past. While every essay in this collection is clearly well researched, accessible, and beautifully written, some were unexpected and I was particularly struck by the chapter Canada and the Art of Ghosts, a reflection on ghost stories as a mode of memorial and the bias inherent in the figures we keep alive through such stories.
I felt like I learned so much from this book and I really appreciated the way Edugyun dealt with controversial topics like transracialism with care and nuance by looking at the issues around racial passing through figures such as Rachel Dolezal, Ray Springle and John Howard Griffin, who passed the other way. While the collection deals with the inevitable difficult and harrowing events of slavery and colonialism, it ultimately opens up a space for hope, not least because Edugyun’s exquisite writing breathes life back into those figures whose existence we know so little about and those whose names have been written out of history.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! Absolutely brilliant. Fantastically written as it is easy to read, yet deals with heavy topics.
This book really made me think about the images I might see in an art gallery or in books and how they are only one side of the story more than I ever have done before, all of this is done without ever feeling preached at. A really well crafted book and I will definitely be looking out for more of this authors work.

Out of the Sun’s based on award-winning, Ghanaian Canadian author, Esi Edugyan’s 2021 Massey lectures. A yearly Canadian event with an illustrious past, previous speakers include Doris Lessing, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Martin Luther King Jr. Edugyan’s thematically-linked lectures are centred on Black history, the visible versus the invisible in the stories we tell ourselves or that are embedded in various cultures. Stories that shape or distort our sense of reality, history and identity, sometimes positive, sometimes fostering dangerous or exclusionary assumptions - dictating who’s placed in the foreground and who relegated to the margins. Edugyan’s essays focus on unearthing or circulating more obscure stories of the African diaspora, that bring the marginalised back to centre. The result’s frequently illuminating, accessible and trenchantly expressed. As part of her exploration of the past and notions of belonging, Edugyan draws on historical records, memoir, and even travelogue, organising her discussion geographically from Europe to her home in Canada to Africa, America and finally Asia.

Edugyan starts out in Europe with a meditation on art and representation, the presence or absence of African subjects in Western paintings: ground-breaking recent work by artists like Kehinde Wiley; discoveries that have disrupted conventional narratives like the biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle and those that have reinforced them, like the life history of eighteenth-century slave, Angelo Soliman, whose skin was removed from his corpse, placed on a frame and displayed in an Austrian museum. In Canada, Edugyan explores ghost stories, and what they might say about a culture through what it remembers and what it strives to forgot. She brings in the fiction of Carmen Maria Machado and Alexander Dumas; the suppression of the turbulent experiences of Canada’s early communities of colour; and how the tragic fate of Montréal house slave, Marie-Joseph Angélique exposes Canada’s troubled relationship with its legacy of slave ownership. America stirs an exploration of the One Drop Rule, passing and, specifically, the controversial concept of the transracial, Blackfishing, and the white people who’ve attempted to pass as Black across a variety of eras and contexts. Memories of Edugyan’s mother take her to Africa, provoking thoughts on Afrofuturism and colonialism; while a visit to China morphs into a consideration of the shifting mythologies attached to the Kunlun, African slaves traded to China; moving to sixteenth-century Japan and the impact of the first, largescale arrival of Black settlers. I was fascinated by Edugyan’s approach, she writes so well and so persuasively. Overall, deeply absorbing and incredibly insightful.

Esi Edugyan's writing in this collection is fantastic, guiding the reader through various continents to articulate the experiences of Black people throughout history.

Whether looking at ancient Japan or modern Europe, Edugyan's writing is sharp and incisive, merging together personal stories with brilliant academic research. She is not afraid to cover topics like Rachel Dolezal's identity, or Black people's representations in art from the past to now.

I think it is this eclectic range of topics that oddly makes this book so cohesive- it feels like a sweeping, fascinating look at race and identity, drawing from its roots to understand its modern day permutations.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Esi Edugyan of Washington Black fame has pusblished a fantastic collection of essays, intricately crafted by combining personal, historical and scientific aspects in order to highlight stories and figures that do not feature in the official archives - she wants her readers to see them and thus change their own ideas based on a more complete picture. The book comprises the 2021 Massey Lectures broadcast as part of CBC Radio's "Ideas" series, where Edugyan presented five lectures on identity and belonging, each centering on another region of the world:

Europe and the Art of Seeing starts with the author sitting for her portrait with painter John Hartman and ventures into classic portraiture and how it represents Black people, historically and in contemporary art.

Canada and the Art of Ghosts explores ghost stories as repositories of our pasts - who are the dead we choose to see, who is forgotten?

America and the Art of Emapthy discusses racial passing and transracialism.

Africa and the Art of Future contemplates the importance of origin stories, and how Afrofuturism invents a future on the past that has been destroyed.

Asia and the Art of Storytelling talks about the Black experience in Asia.

All of these essays are captivating, relevant, and very well-written. Read them.

This is a fantastic essay collection in which author Esi Edugyan explores the socio-cultural history of Black people as represented through art.

Edugyan discusses a number of topics in these essays, all the while instilling her passion and knowledge for art. In the first chapter, for example, she discusses the inclusion and representation of Blackness in European art and the puzzling case of the 18th century portrait in which Dido Belle who was one of the first Black members of the English aristocracy. Eduygan charts her own process of learning and reflection around this image. Historically complex yet culturally rich, the author is unsettled by the murky symbolism that Dido Belle represents, despite the fact that Dido’s very existence has potentially interesting links to the abolition of the slave trade (via her father Lord Mansfield). This is contrasted, however, with the work of Kehinde Wiley, with special reference to his painting ‘Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps’ which reimagines the painting of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David from 1803.

Researching the intersection of black people and their representation across Canada, Europe, America and Asia, Edugyan effortlessly translates artworks onto the written page, allowing them to materialise for the reader, rich with colour and life. Through this she creates a historical foundation through artwork and imagery, using it as a language to establish a ‘shared idea of reality’. She states that this shared ‘history functions in the way that language does’ and thus endeavours to explore how this social tool (or weapon, depending on your POV) can be used to understand the lives of those who came before.

The first chapters which, ostensibly, cover the topics of European art and later the ‘ghosts’ of American art, visual culture and storytelling, serve as groundwork for a powerful chapter on Afrofuturism.

‘To have a full sense of what’s possible for your future, you must have a sense of the past, a reality that was and remains difficult or even impossible for many people of African descent in the shadow of slavery and colonialism. [...] Afrofuturism is the story of dislocation. But it is also the story of recovery, of finding new anchors. Once the past has been extinguished, a future based on its memory is not only the path forward but a commemoration.’

This extraordinary collection is articulate, intelligent and a simply fascinating insight into the narrative that has shaped Black lives, experiences, languages, cultures and history up to the modern day.