Reviews with content warning for Torture - Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

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Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi

9 reviews

readandfindout's review

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informative reflective slow-paced

4.25

Style/writing: 4 stars
Themes: 4.5 stars
Perspective: 4 stars

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

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stevia333k's review against another edition

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dark informative fast-paced

5.0

This anthology gives me a lot of topics to further look up. Oppression is heartbreaking but I liked how this history took pains to show how things got layered upon layered some melting quicker than others because a lot of histiography tends to act like the time dimension doesn't exist and that things are eternal. Like yeah, we were always bad off but there's been many slow creeps towards fascism, like revolution & counterrevolution. I'm marginalized but I'm white, so I'm feeling awkward about using the pronoun we, but still.

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jennie_white2008's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

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sydapel's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

I usually don't rate the anti-racist books I read, but holy shit was this the most impactful thing I've read this year, and I haven't seen it talked about nearly enough. It's so uniquely structured and powerfully written, and more than any other book I've read made me directly confront the white supremacy rooted in this country's history. It's long, but so worth your time.

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mydearwatsonbooks's review against another edition

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steveatwaywords's review

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.75

This collection of historical essays is so accessible, it's a wonder it is not more widely used in schools and public discourse. Each entry, focused usually on a small or local figure at some point in the 5-year span, is also given the broader context in the narrative of black experience and the American story and written by a different author. While some topics are expected (Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Hip-Hop), none are "traditionally-taught" accounts but each reveals an unexpected (at least for me) connection, a significant consequence, or a series of details which--while barely planned by editors Kendi and Blain--underscore larger patterns.

Widely researched (though awkwardly cited with difficult-to-navigate and unmarked end notes), nearly every essay hints at still deeper scholarship to be revealed. I say "nearly every essay" because this is one of two concerns I had about the project:

1) While I am not certain of the directives given the various writers, not each approached the task with equal devotion to scholarship. I expected (and desired) analysis and judgments to accompany the topics and, especially in the earlier essays, these appeared, solidly built upon documented evidence. In a few (fortunately quite few) cases, however, there was more judgment than analysis and more still than documented detail. This was frustrating, as the tone for the book had been set by more focused historians earlier. But when the rhetoric grew powerful in place of scholarship, the interest in learning waned. In my view, it undermined the credibility of the collection as a whole.

2) My other concern is not truly that. As large as the collection is (80-odd brief essays with 10 poems), it is yet incredibly brief, barely skimming the richness and nuanced diversity of narratives we have of black history. In other words, I found myself reading the work as an introduction to larger studies (some completed or underway by the writers), or as a first volume, perhaps, to another few thousand which might still be written. To be sure, this is hardly a criticism but a printing limitation; but to that end, I would have appreciated a section which pushed readers to more serious scholarship out there on its topics. The brief writer bio entries at the end were in this way somewhat helpful, but not reliably focused on expanding the reader's experience.

Still, as I purge my bookshelf of over 5000 titles, <i>Four Hundred Souls</i> will stay, because it a volume I am confident to return.

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apworden's review

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

This is an excellent overview of African American history. The variety helps break up challenging content and allows for better reflection. The audiobook is also fantastic.

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sherbertwells's review

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adventurous challenging informative reflective medium-paced

3.0

“The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black People. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.

Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.

Ever” (235)

In the century to come, I wonder whether academics will attribute a specific style to the nonfiction of the early 21st century. Modern-day readers can recognize turn-of-the-century Communist propaganda at first glance. We know what an 18th-century pamphlet is supposed to sound like. But we don’t see the literature of our own time the same way; we recognize the stylistic choices of individuals, not generations. Is our current perspective unadulterated by the obfuscating lens of the historian? Or is it merely unrefined?

The solution to this question can only be found by carefully considering a quiver of contemporary writers, such are found in Four Hundred Souls, a recent anthology from historians Ibram X. Kendi (I’ve reviewed his Stamped from the Beginning here) and Keisha N. Blain. Subtitled A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, this collection displays the work of 92 Black academics, journalists and poets. Each author is given a five-year period in American history to cover, starting with the arrival of enslaved people in 1619 and ending with the Black Lives Matter movement. At the end of every 40 years is a poem commemorating the achievement and suffering of African-Americans during that period.

Most of the essays are less than five pages each, so the extraordinary one fly by. Some of my favorite essays are: “The Middle Passage” by Mary E. Hicks, which discusses the lives of West African mariners “on the margins of the infamous [slave] trade” (67), “The Selling of Joseph” by Brandon R. Byrd, “Maroons and Marronage” by Sylviane A. Diouf, “Phillis Wheatley” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Cotton” by Kiese Laymon, a personal recollection, “Atlanta” by Tera W. Hunter, “John Wayne Niles” by William A. Darity, Jr., “The Hip-Hop Generation” by Bakari Kitwana and “Anita Hill” by Salamishah Tillet. My favorite poem was Patricia Smith’s “Coiled and Unleashed,” which reads like a violent and beautiful birth. Before I picked up Four Hundred Souls, Smith and many other brilliant authors in the collection were unfamiliar to me.

“When we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget” (4)

Luckily not every author is a stranger: Angela Davis is here, as are Isabelle Wilkerson and the poet Jericho Brown. I was especially excited to see Keeyanga Yamhatta-Taylor, who works in the same field as my mother, writing about property ownership and “urban renewal” in 1970s Chicago. The promotion of Black academics like her is a powerful tool against the erasure of Black history, and the sheer number of voices in this anthology creates a very useful source for examining the nuances of contemporary antiracist literature.

Four Hundred Souls is not a monolith, but once you start looking, it’s easy to find commonalities between its 80-odd essays. Some begin with a personal memory or an interview with the descendent of a famous individual. Others quote liberally from Donald Trump and make observations about the state of America between 2016 and 2020. Many essays juxtapose cool, academic detail (“Between 1715 and 1763...only 16 out of 636 British slavers ported in New York”) with earnest imagination (“The shame and humiliation that enslated people suffered remained plainly visible in their tears and in the silent screams of their eyes”) in order to reinforce the urgency of their message (88). This technique isn’t dishonest, exactly, but once you’ve seen it twenty times in the same book it feels more like a rhetorical gimmick than a profound statement of feeling.

Because I only ended up liking some of the essays in Four Hundred Souls, I can’t swear by the whole collection. But that fact only demonstrates how many different voices have contributed to it. Rather than a definitive history, the book should be treated as a reading list. If you encounter a topic that you want to learn more about, look up the author’s other works and start there. In my case, I found the depiction of Reconstruction-era urban life particularly interesting, and can’t wait to see where the next book takes me!

Four Hundred Souls is a two-way gate. It leads the modern reader into a grave and mysterious labyrinth, whose turns are marked with the names of heroes and martyrs. But twenty years from now it will swing the other way, revealing a hall of mirrors and the letters—distinct, hopefully, despite the years—of a country in perpetual crisis.

“Together, despite the odds, we have made it this far. The powerful essays and poetry in Four Hundred Souls are a testament to how much we have overcome, and how we have managed to do it together, despite our differences and diverse perspectives.

Yet. I am not convinced that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. At least not yet” (391)

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