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One dayas a small child, Toni Morrison found a heavy metal trunk belonging to her mother.
Then the trunks lid fell shut on her tiny hand.
Her mother soothed the pain away, but the memory lingered.
Improvisation, originality, change.
Rather than be about those characteristics, the novel would become them, writes Morrison.
The evening purse, the overheard lyrics.
They clung to the author until she needed to retrieve them.
There have been many books about major African American figures in history and culture-making.
In February, Clover Hope published her rap historyThe Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip Hop.
Danyel SmithsShine Bright: A Personal History of Black Women in Popis due out next year.
Some works aim to redirect the ways we think about American art.
Some point to artists from thepast in an attempt to name the overlooked.
Others just want to embellish and speculate.
All are exercises in learning toseebetter, to hold our past up to the light.
That idea is key to the questions thatLiner Notesponders.
)Liner Notes, the book, is a litany for what could have been.
Hopkins published articles on Black opera singers and serialized fiction in theColored Americanin the early 1900s.
Perhaps it was a pivotal connection that she stored away yet cherished.
She writes about the narrative around the rediscovery of the early blueswomen Geeshie Wiley and L.V.
When Brooks begins to experiment with possibilities, sentences can descend into a menu of rhetorical questions.
She praises the spaces beyond academia, quotidian public and consumer cultures that produced innovative art and criticism.
But I wonder how Brookss own enormous book would ever get into the hands of the quotidian public.
Still, she offers a rigorous and sweeping counter-history of American pop.
In the most graceful sections of her book, Brooks achieves that, too.
Black artists have always labored both within the trends of market demand and outside of them.
To be sure, Blackness is chic; social and political awareness are popular enough to feign or co-opt.
You know what they will say.
Why, she was a devil.
And you know something…why, they are right.
I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America too.
Like Brooks, Abdurraqib sees performance as a site of radical questioning, experimentation, and dream-making.
This book is not a work of theory.
We watch him watching his idols and we watch him dancing along with them, sometimes clumsily.
Abdurraqib meditates on a wide range of performances that have moved him, musical and otherwise.
Toni Morrisons legacy suffuses Abdurraqibs work as it does Brookss.
Abdurraqib is less concerned about tracing an intellectual lineage than Brooks.
Notable figures and events in African American history have been revisited and reconsidered.
Whilesomethingis happening, Kendis framing of Black cultural production as a series of bursts feels ahistorical to me.
It undersells our resiliency through dark times.
