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In Praise of Black Performance

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Patricia Elzie-Tuttle

Contributing Editor

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.

Today’s book recommendation was awarded the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize, and was a 2021 National Book Award Nominee. I finally picked it up this summer, after years on my TBR, and my god, what a read! Abdurraqib is a phenomenal writer, as many of his loyal readers can attest. Written with deep reverence and intense curiosity, this book instills the same feelings in readers throughout each chapter.

Book cover of A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

This book is such an immersive read and I was simultaneously transported and transfixed by the stories and examinations of a variety of Black performances. Abdurraqib seamlessly connects the personal to the national to even the global. Reading this gave me the sense of Black performance as a fractal where individual performances, whether by professional vocalists or even dancers in a high school gym, are representative of the larger collective.

Many of the essays and explorations are of musicians and vocalists though not necessarily completely focused on their musical performances. The author looks at Black funerals as performance, writing specifically about Michael Jackson and then, at length, Aretha Franklin. Being unable to leave the topic of Aretha, Abdurraqib writes about Amazing Grace, the documentary released a year after Franklin’s passing. Aretha Franklin didn’t want the live footage of her “Amazing Grace” recording released, and the author provides much-needed background and detail about the live recording and more.

From Josephine Baker to spades, magical negroes to minstrel shows, this book may not cover the breadth of Black performance but the carefully curated assortment creates a fascinating tapestry spanning over a century. I love how the author connects things that are seen as archaic, like blackface, to the ways that they regularly occur in the present day.

This book made me think deeply and critically of so many things that I hadn’t previously considered. Michael Jackson was not the first to moonwalk, and not only does the author unveil the history, but he then connects this to one of my favorite subjects and vibes, Afrofuturism. Black people have a long history of imagining ourselves among the stars, whether it be Octavia E. Butler, Billy Dee Williams, or even Patti Labelle.

If you, like me, have had this book on your TBR it is time to pick it up.


That’s it for now, book-lovers!

Patricia

Find me on Book Riot, the All the Books podcast, Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram.

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