An absolutely brilliant reflection on Black history centered around the color blue. From indigo farming to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye to blues music, Imani Perry beautifully weaves together moving stories in a way that feels both timeless and completely new. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Imani Perry uses the power of precise yet lyrical language plus personal history to illuminate an entire American culture. Easy to sink into this book, difficult to let it go. It's the kind of book that sparks further curiosity and consideration.

I vividly remember how captivated I was the first time I read Imani Perry’s writing. I picked up a copy of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons to read before she came to speak at our local book festival. I must have read the first page at least ten times because I couldn’t get enough of how she commanded language and ideas. I felt the same way while reading Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which is both a meditation on the significance of the color blue to Black life and culture and a journey through history. I’ve often wondered why we typically study various histories in isolation instead of zooming out to see a global perspective, and Perry’s book shows exactly why it’s much more interesting and beneficial to look at history holistically. I was fascinated by how often the color blue figured prominently in Black history from early indigo trading to Blues music. I can only imagine the meticulous research that went into a project like this, and how it must have felt to travel through so many stories of both joy and heartbreak. As Perry states, “There is no single Black essence. There is no fundamental way of being Black,” and she shows that using various shades and iterations of the color blue.

To me, the importance of this book is captured in one of the final chapters, “Seeing the Seventh Son,” where Perry writes about the importance of haunting the past: “We haunt the past to refuse to let it lie comfortably as it was. We give back to them [the ancestors] in return for the inheritances they have bestowed upon us.” As I continue to see teaching history and literature under attack and stories of marginalized groups banned or otherwise silenced, haunting the past is increasingly important for us all. Black in Blues shows the importance of beauty, art, music, and joy in the face of oppression, because that is how humanity survives. Perry writes that her goal was to “attend to what these artists teach, in sound and color, about the human condition,” and she does just that. She goes on to write that “[c]onjurers survive conquerors.” Though it is painful and disheartening, the current political climate in the United States is not new or unique. Black in Blues tells a story of Blackness through its link to the color blue that highlights both hope and pain and details a complex history that is vital to understanding the world today.

Imani Perry is a brave and loving writer who is experimenting on the page as to what it means to write a history of a people. This book is so unique and something only she could write. I loved it and was moved deeply by certain sections, passages, and pages. Some parts were so dense I know I need to return to them again and again. Other parts felt like a reach of connection. The ambition and complexity of this one is to be applauded. I never had really considered blue and Blackness but now I will never be able to see them apart.

“Wonder is a near universal response to deep rivers and vast oceans. But for some, the water also evokes terror. In it, I see God and slave ships both.”

A big thank you to Ecco Publishers, Harper Collins, and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of Imani Perry’s new book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry’s book explores the color and significance of blue from multiple perspectives, examining its tranquility, as well as its violence, its beauty as well as its decadence. Although to say that this book simply examines different shades of blue is a severe underrepresentation, the book considers how blue is interwoven into the lives of Africans and African Americans throughout different cultures and historical eras. To do this, Perry examines different shades of blue in many different contexts and themes. Several books I’ve recently read have been touching on some of these same recurring themes, and Perry’s book was one of the more inventive that aligned with these. For one, Toni Morrison features prominently in these books, and I really loved how Perry framed part of her inquiry into the color blue by discussing Baby Suggs from Beloved. She refers to Baby Suggs’s desire to take some time and think about colors, noting how Blue “never hurt no body,” yet Perry notes “but it surely did. The word even denotes ‘hurt.’ ‘Blue’ has been a word for melancholy in English for centuries.” Perry’s book looks at all of the different ways that blue has played a role in African American life, examining different areas including art, clothing, jewelry, music, and literature. One of the other themes was books written by interdisciplinary artists—those whose work encompasses different areas, yet finds commonalities and intersections among different fields. Perry’s work was so interesting because the focus on blue would seem so limited, but she expands the topic by exploring history, literature, art, and culture. And while the focus is primarily on African American history, Perry traces preferences to blue and its various shades all over the diaspora, traveling to Liberia, the Kongo, Haiti, and other regions where people were enslaved.
Perry spends time discussing the different shades of blue, and I didn’t realize how indigo was made, nor how precious it was in earlier times. Finding the stories about how these shades were developed and used for clothing was fascinating, yet also sad to see how labor and processes were often exploited to generate wealth that was never shared. She also discusses the idea of Blue Black, and revisiting Curtis Mayfield’s famous proclamation of “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” and its significance in culture and history. I think that my favorite parts of the book were those that dealt with literature and music. One chapter focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of my all-time favorite books, and how the use of Blue features in Hurston’s work. She also discusses the dancer Katherine Dunham, who studied traditional dancing in Haiti around the same time Hurston was there for ethnography for Tell My Horse. It was interesting to see the parallels and differences between these two artists, who were navigating different social and class circles due to the nature of their work and possibly their skin tones as well. Hurston appears in other chapters that focused on Hoodoo and root work, which are often related to the Blues. I was amazed at Perry’s ability to draw all of these topics and artists together under the rubric of blue. It was fascinating to see her analysis and understanding of how blue impacted lives and cultures in different ways. Another section focused on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, looking at their works and how blue features in them. For the chapter about Richard Wright, it focused on Mississippi Blues, and Perry brought up a great quote that I wasn’t really familiar with “The most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and down-heartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic: their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through the sheer force of sensuality….” It was interesting because I didn’t remember Wright as being kind of musical in his writing, but I can see this kind of resiliency in Black Boy. The following chapter focuses on Ellison’s Invisible Man, another book that I used to teach and was always a favorite. There are so many interesting characters, many of whom are musical, and Perry focuses on the character with the blueprints, who asks the narrator if he’s “got the dog”. I always thought this was such an interesting part, where the chiasmus elicits a kind of reflective questioning—about whether the dog has us, or if we have the dog. Perry then goes on to link this section focusing on the idea of blueprints to Thelonious Monk and his composition of the song “In Walked Bud.” It was so cool how Perry brought these ideas together—blueprints as a map of intention, and as Ellison notes, the need to always improvise and adapt to the situation, which is what Monk experienced in his composition, based on a Berlin tune, that he adapted to a situation with police brutality. You have to read these connections. Other chapters focused on both DuBois and Booker T Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. One of my favorite chapters was focused on George Washington Carver, who studied and did research at Tuskegee. I didn’t realize that he was a painter who used peanuts to create colors, especially blues. Again, just fascinating scholarship and analysis to bring all of these different aspects of African American history, culture, and art into the various shades of blue. I’m looking forward to re-reading different sections, and I think that this would be a great book to either supplement some of the main texts discussed in it (Morrison, Ellison, Wright), or to use as a springboard for further discussion on topics related to race, identity, culture, and art. This is a remarkable book, filled with accessible complexities and considerations, yet solely focused on blue. Truly an amazing book, and I can’t wait to read more of Imani Perry’s work.

When you think of Black, do you also think of blue? You will after you read Imani Perry’s history-memoir hybrid, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. In this new nonfiction text, Perry details the history of the color blue in relation to the African diaspora. She bounces between a historical analysis and her personal history with the color: from the dyeing of indigo in West Africa to indigo plantations in the Americas; from burying enslaved Black people with blue jewelry and under periwinkle flowers to the shade of blue of her late grandmother’s ceiling; and from folktales, like the blue-gummed Black person, to blue in literature, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Full review here: https://playing-in-the-dark.com/2025/01/24/review-of-review-of-black-in-blues-how-a-color-tells-the-story-of-my-people/

See full review on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website:

"Harvard professor and Birmingham, Alabama, native Imani Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction for “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.” Perry’s award-winning opus follows her journey through 10 Southern states to magnify the region’s far-reaching impact on America’s long-term success.

In her latest work, Perry takes the same principle she used in “South to America” — exploring how a microcosm influences the larger community — and applies it to the color blue and African people. She argues that blue appears with such intensity, relevance and frequency in both ancient and modern African culture, the shade serves as a tether to the homeland for the diaspora displaced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Collectively, her compilation of essays, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” delivers a meditative and healing introspection on Black history presented through a fresh and innovative lens..."

https://www.ajc.com/things-to-do/imani-perry-investigates-the-significance-of-the-color-blue-in-black-culture/TXHPASJIDJDZDL3VWICDUDLIWY/

The Run-Down: Black in Blues by Imani Perry is a grab-bag of brilliance that fails to equal the sum of its parts.


Review:
Imani Perry’s latest book, Black in Blues, is a collection of essays and musings that follow the history of Blackness and Black culture through the lens of the color blue. The essays are grouped loosely in chronological order, beginning with the early modern period and the construction of race and ending in the present day.

That this ambitious project doesn’t fail completely at its task is a testament to Perry’s indisputable brilliance. It features her trademark clear, concise, and powerful writing and astonishing breadth of knowledge about history and culture. Instead of molding the book to fit a clear narrative or argumentative structure, Perry allows the book to follow her train of thought as she free-associates between instances of the color blue popping up in her research and her thoughts on Black history, identity, and culture. This free association sometimes accentuates her extraordinary ability to make historical meaning out of the seemingly mundane and communicate that meaning with clarity. A generous interpretation of her approach would be that it mimics the impressionistic and improvisational nature of blues music for a positive effect. A less generous interpretation would be that her approach is self-indulgent and disorganized. I think both interpretations are fair and true; I found myself equal parts enthralled and frustrated by this book. For every essay that left me enthusiastic about the quality of Perry’s historical analysis and writing ability, another essay would leave me irritated with her abrupt transitions and muddled points.

Perhaps my analysis would be more forgiving if Perry herself hadn’t gone out of her way to state that the book’s blue theme is more than a gimmick or framing device; she claims that her book will uncover something more substantial or fundamental about the role the color blue plays in Black history and culture. I kept an open mind throughout the book in hopes that I would see her vision, but by the end of the book I remained unconvinced.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Ecco, for providing me with an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

✨ Review ✨ Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry, Narrated by Imani Perry

Thanks to Ecco, Harper Audio and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

This book traces a deep relationship between Blackness and the color blue, finding it in art and literature, flora and fauna, in indigo and cobalt, in music (the Blues!), in the names of people, and so much more.

Perry defines Blackness expansively, from the US to across Africa, in past and present. She challenges us to think about the complexities of Blackness, for example, in thinking about the ways that African peoples crossed paths before the slave trade (and how these inter-African connections impacted their experiences as enslaved peoples later). I appreciated how this expanded my thinking.

The book is written as short thematic essays that ranged widely in their topics. From thinking about George Washington Carver to Toni Morrison's writing to blue morning glories, from contemporary art to the origins of the Blues to enslaved peoples in the fields, this book stretches across times and places. At its heart, it challenges power structures, imperialism, and enslavement, while also encouraging us to look to the color of blue as both a source of joy and marker of sorrow among Black peoples.

There were pieces of this book that resonated more deeply than others -- and pieces that will interest some readers more than others, but this seems consistent with essay collections. I learned so much from it and have much to return to and think about more.

🎧 I love a book narrated by the author (especially when it's done well), and she brings so much of her passion for this topic to the page. Listening is hard because you'll want to highlight, but it's also a beautiful way to encounter these reflections.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 for content and quality of writing, 4 for flow)

Genre: essay collection
Setting: US + Africa and beyond
Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
Pub Date: Jan 28, 2025

Read this if you like:
⭕️ nonfiction essay collections
⭕️ Black history, culture, and identity
⭕️ the color Blue

Imani Perry has done it again. This is a stellar book and a must read for anyone interested in American history and culture. I love how the book helped to me reconsider my relationship to the color blue. Beautifully written and thought provoking book…and Titus Kaphar’s art for the cover!!

For a reader who spends a lot of their time bogged down in blue, I couldn't help but find myself attracted to this new book by Imani Perry.
One thing that I've noticed, in common with her peers, is that when someone writes a book about the colour blue, and in this case, the genre named after it, is that they *all* write a meta-textual explanation for their obsession. The product is usually the book you hold in your hands. Unlike her peers, however, Perry skews less like a philosophical lyric essay and more like a history professor with a huge breadth of knowledge and who has done her research. I can't wait for this book to come out. Perry writes her own version of a folktale she heard as a child and weave it into the history of the colour blue, the genre 'blues,' and how her Blackness plays a role in both.

I really enjoyed this book and thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

I've been really into learning about the color wheel lately so the title of this book immediately intrigued me. This was such a unique lens to write about Black culture and experiences throughout the diaspora. Perry's writing is informative, reflective, and emotional. I will forever look at the choice of the color blue in Black spaces, fashion, and art differently! There were some chapters where I didn't understand why Perry discussed certain things or I felt like the chapter didn't stay on the topic of the chapter's title,. Some of those topics started in one chapter and ended in another. Overall, I was able to follow, but it may be confusing to some readers. I also would have appreciated some citations to help distinguish between facts and Perry's opinion or personal reflections, This was a beautiful book. I will be purchasing it for my personal library!

Thank you NetGalley and Ecco Books for the e-ARC!

Very informative and well researched. This author never disappoints.
****Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review****

Book Review: A Masterpiece of Black Existence and Aesthetic

Imani Perry’s latest work is a stunning testament to the richness of our collective Black existence. Weaving together history, anthropology, and the soul of the BLUES, Perry crafts a narrative that resonates deeply, echoing like a song passed down through generations. Her ability to marry rigorous scholarship with an evocative, lyrical style is nothing short of magnificent.

Reading this book felt like a journey through the essence of Black life and art, its joys and struggles, its beauty and resilience. Perry captures the heart of what makes our stories sacred, connecting cultural threads with precision and grace. It is, simply put, a masterpiece.

I was fortunate to receive an early copy via NetGalley, as the book officially releases on January 28. I urge everyone to preorder this gem from an independent bookseller; it deserves a place on every bookshelf.

This book will be the first selection for Auntie’s Bookshelf in 2025, insha’Allah. And I must add, seeing Ashon Crawley’s name in the pages was an unexpected delight. Brilliant, indeed!

Bravo, Imani Perry. This work is a gift to us all.

A perfect example of narrative nonfiction. Perry is a storytelling professor for us all. In beautiful prose through the color blue, we are taken through a redemptive arc.

Imani Perry is quickly become a must read author for me. Her newest, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People publishes January 28th and is not to be missed non fiction. Perry opens this exploration of blue by telling us where her blue began and framing this as a testimony given by a people who created a sound (the Blues) for the color so frequently named as a favorite. She explores the dichotomy of both a lovely and vibrant blue and what it means to be "feeling blue". She then brings us all the way back in history to the dyed indigo clothes of West Africa used to trade for human life and the earliest indigo plantations to explore how in blue water one can see both God and ships of the enslaved.

I can't possibly do justice to what Perry is doing here, but I can absolutely urge you to pre order this exploration of blue and how it shapes the lives of Black people. While this is true non fiction with some primary sources and plenty of information, Perry's prose is stunning and hypnotizing. I'm in awe of this book and highly recommend picking up South to American if you haven't already while we wait for pub date. Thank you @eccobooks for an advanced copy.

Easily one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read this year. Perry takes us on a journey to investigate the cultural significance of the color Blue in African American history and culture. Not only does she leave no stone unturned and touches on a variety of subjects like blues music and how Black folks have been referred to as being so Black that we are blue, she does it all with so much love and care. I couldn’t have asked for a better read!

Black in Blues is a fantastic look by Imani Perry at art and race and how both are complimentary to each other and influenced the lives of many especially Black people.

Thanks to Ecco and Netgalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available January 2025

Expansive yet precise, Imani Perry's Black in Blues traces the appearance of the term blue in African and Black history, starting pre-colonization and ending in our present era. As with all of Perry's books, there is a delicate balance of history, cultural analysis, and personal reflection. I thoroughly enjoyed the vivid way Perry brings it all to life and seems to be able to time travel without much break in logical reasoning. What felt a bit off was the ending, particularly the multiple endings. With a book this enormous, I know a tidy ending wasn't possible, but it feels like Perry became ummoored and lost in the blues herself. Still, this is a worthy read!