Reviews - Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

63 reviews for:

Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

Esi Edugyan

4.36 AVERAGE

charlottejones952's review against another edition

4.25

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

yassmin_a's review against another edition

4.25

reflective slow-paced

A collection I’ll probably come back to time and time again. This isn’t necessarily something to read for the ‘facts’ per se, tis a wonderful ‘meditation’ on race thru the lens of art, story, place, history. I appreciated the reflective tone, and learning of stories and characters I didn’t know of, or only had passing familiarity with. Well researched, beautifully expressed.

robynne's review

5.0

informative reflective medium-paced

justabean_reads's review

5.0

funny informative sad fast-paced

This does what it says on the tin. It's a humorous, approachable summary of the major issues currently surrounding Indigenous-Crown relations, along with myth busting, suggested solutions, and very extensive end notes for further reading. If you're looking for an overview of Indigenous rights, I haven't run into a better one. It's from 2016, and therefore a little out of date on recent court rulings, etc, but most of the stuff that's been a problem for the last a hundred and fifty years plus is still indeed a problem, so that doesn't really matter.

carlybellesbooks's review against another edition

5.0

emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

This seemingly disparate collection of essays covers a wide range of ground in the exploration of Black lives throughout history, with particular reference to their absence from historical record, artistic representation, and how this impacts our wider cultural consciousness. Moving from the Black figures of European portraiture to Afrofuturism to the shock her own face caused on a trip to China, Edugyun interrogates the experiences of black lives concealed throughout various points in history and what this means for the way we understand the world now. By looking at whose stories are not told, and the gaps in which these hidden lives might be glimpsed, she offers thoughtful insights into this lost history and how these absences cast a shadow over our cultural narratives.
Exploring themes such as art, migration, identity and storytelling, Edugyun weaves personal reflections and memoir throughout. Her writing is both tender and sharp as she speculates on the lives we will never get to know and what that means for contemporary lives searching for a lost past. While every essay in this collection is clearly well researched, accessible, and beautifully written, some were unexpected and I was particularly struck by the chapter Canada and the Art of Ghosts, a reflection on ghost stories as a mode of memorial and the bias inherent in the figures we keep alive through such stories.
I felt like I learned so much from this book and I really appreciated the way Edugyun dealt with controversial topics like transracialism with care and nuance by looking at the issues around racial passing through figures such as Rachel Dolezal, Ray Springle and John Howard Griffin, who passed the other way. While the collection deals with the inevitable difficult and harrowing events of slavery and colonialism, it ultimately opens up a space for hope, not least because Edugyun’s exquisite writing breathes life back into those figures whose existence we know so little about and those whose names have been written out of history. I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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