This is maybe one of my favourite books I’ve received from Netgalley, and I’m now going to go back and read more of Abdurraqib’s work because I’m so interested in his perspective. A Little Devil in America is such a work of love, and Abdurraqib’s expertise and passion shines through. He covers a huge amount of ground (historically, geographically, and culturally) and yet in so much depth; there was a lot of food for thought in every essay.

The one thing I will say is that the writing style came off as a little pretentious to me. You can tell the author was originally a slam poet, and I don’t really like slam poetry. It often worked well for what Abdurraqib was trying to do, and I tuned it out eventually to focus on what the text actually said - but I’d recommend this book with the one caveat that I think some people will really dislike the writing style, so maybe read a sample first and check if it’s for you.

My favourites essays were: on marathons and tunnels; on going home as performance; sixteen ways of looking at blackface; beyonce performs at the super bowl and I think about all of the jobs I've had; the beef sometimes begins with a dance move; on the performance of softness; board up the doors, tear down the walls; on times I have forced myself not to dance.

A fascinating selection of essays about Black culture through the author's eyes, some are innately personal about his own experiences that are lovely moments of oral Black history, others are the author's thoughts on key cultural moments and figures. The importance of funerals is explored through the lengthy televised funeral of Aretha Franklin. Black identity is explored through Whitney Houston, her music, the way she was marketed and how the Black community responded to her. I really enjoyed the mix of personal and the more global. There are important reminders in this book about how Black culture has influenced White America without making any dent in the racism experienced by Black people. An important point explored with care in this engaging book.

With thanks to the publisher and Net galley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is an excellent collection of essays, on aspects of Black performance and Abdurraqib's thoughts on his perceptions of them. The essays are moving and thoughtful, and the writer explores the larger significance of these performances, and performers, both to him, on a personal level and to the world. It's excellently written, and and skilfully combines non-fictional biographical details with free-ranging meditations on specific personal circumstances of both the writer and the performer. Abdurraqib is very insightful, and his perspectives are very nucanced, so unlike a lot of other books in this vein that come across as solipsism, in this book you're genuinely interested to know what his opinions are. It also helps, of course, that he's a great writer, with an amazing talent for perfect turn of phrase. I think the author's around the same age as me, so his essays on Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston were particularly evocative, I've grown up with these performers as well, and his writings on their lives was fascinating. Highly recommend this compelling, page-turner of a book.

Its sometimes just about the writing. Don't get me wrong, A Little Devil In America has a subject that interests me, a discussion of Black American culture through performance, which allows it to touch on a multiple number of threads of how Black America infiltrates, is celebrated and also how it is also limited by the act of performance. But this is a discursive book which could feel like a disjointed set of essays if it wasn't for the natural flow of the language used, the occasional slip into a poetic personal stream of consciousness to give life to the thesis. Hanif Abdurrqib is a poet as well as a critic, so this makes sense, but it marks A Little Devil In America this out in an increasingly crowded area of Black cultural studies as both personal but also authoritative.

Some of the subjects here: Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, have been written about endlessly. Some others - Joe Tex, Sandman, Bill Bailey, less so. What I really enjoyed here though was how these performances reflected obliquely on larger Black issues. The frankly very funny section on how Whitney Houston couldn't dance both reflects on the cliche that all Black people can dance, but also gets used to talk about how paying your dues becomes important and how Black talent gets spun for a White audience (and what that might mean to Black audiences). The piece on Merry Clayton' s vocals in Gimme Shelter talks more about missed opportunities and how sublime talent can be used by the White world without too much thought but with much seen and unseen longterm damage. The Josephine Baker section is packed full of incident but the performance he is interested in is a speech about civil rights she did in the fifties on a tour back in the States.

What Abdurraqib does in this enjoyable journey is to posit the thesis that Black performance needs a vocal audience. That the constant feedback and support is a direct outcome of and a safety net caused by a structurally racist country with a history of slavery. This at the same time this creates issues around everything being performative - not for nothing does he keep returning to the subheading "On Times I Have Forced Myself To Dance" - but ends with "On Times I Have Forced Myself Not To Dance". I think there is something informative and nuanced about every performance he writes about here, but its as a flowing full piece of criticism and poetry the book really dazzles.

"i am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. i am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. i am in love today but am afraid that i might not be tomorrow. and that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse".

Beautifully written, engaging, timely and important.

Ohio resident Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and music critic and is both critically acclaimed and a good commercial proposition in his homeland. This non-fiction work is something we’ve been seeing a fair bit of recently- a mash-up of memoir and analysis. At times it feels like a collection of essays but I don’t think it is. Linking the pieces together is the theme of the black performer in America and coming from that is the significance of dance. Saying it like this, however, is very much simplifying matters. Abdurraqib, being a poet sees things in terms of metaphor and the notion of dance and performance is used to touch on many aspects of the American experience, and especially the African-American experience.
Also, being a poet Abdurraqib does not see things the way many of us do, he has the ability to zoom in on a detail and expand out from that. It’s often a moment in a life he finds fascinating and what it tells us about that particular life and the environment in which it was lived and that in itself is intriguing. In terms of the performers examined there is a very good range and I find much of his writing illuminating. With Aretha Franklin, he examines her funeral, and what the “sending home” of the ritual says of a life and then moves backwards to the filmed version of her live gospel recording “Amazing Grace”- the biggest selling gospel live album of all time. With Whitney Houston he focuses on the response of the black audience and how that changed. There’s a lively section about the antagonism between two demonstrative performers, Joe Tex and James Brown. The issue of “blackface” is dealt with through William Lane known as Master Juba who Charles Dickens saw perform and how casual racism caused a latter day TV tribute by Ben Vereen to this black minstrel who performed in blackface to become meaningless because his performance was cut inappropriately.
People who have not fitted in to what was might expected of them are examined including Sammy Davis Jnr, Michael Jackson and the always amazing to read about Josephine Baker.
This is where this book is the strongest for me, a white British reader, I can see the common threads and follow the arguments. When the author veers away from this central theme I miss the tightness of the structure although I am still impressed by the writing.
And the writing is impassioned, creative, energetic and very often enthralling. Culturally, very few will get all the references initially because of the broad timescale Abdurraqib employs in this work. If this looseness of structure and digressive style which I have mentioned before (most recently in “Gay Bar” by Jeremy Atherton Lin) is going to become commonplace I’m just going to have to get used to it because to ignore it would mean missing out on impressive, quality writing.
A Little Devil in America was published in the UK by Allen Lane on 30th March 2021. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.