Alwynne's Reviews > Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race

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.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Serpent’s Tail for an arc