Reading James Baldwin: Imani Perry - Sonny's Blues & The Uses of the Blues

“James Baldwin saw art—in particular the Blues—as a way of living through and with suffering. It is a spiritual and philosophical practice at once,” writes Imani Perry.

In this talk, featuring one of Baldwin’s most famous works, the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” Perry connects Baldwin’s ideas on the Blues with her own, exploring, as she does in her new book, Black in Blues, how the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?”

Inspired by Baldwin, Perry takes the world’s favorite color on a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

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Imani Perry won the National Book Award in 2022 for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Her new book is Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. She is also the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry; May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, which won the 2019 John Hope Franklin Book Award; and Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. She is a professor in African American Studies and in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

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Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as James Baldwin. As distinctive on the page as on the airwaves, his voice is indelibly associated with the demand for racial justice in the United States, a demand that continues to make him one of our most pressing and urgent contemporaries.

To mark Baldwin’s centenary, the Authors Guild Foundation invites you to join a conversation featuring some of our most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists as we gather to celebrate, study, and reflect on the legacy of Baldwin’s life and work.

Host or Publisher Authors Guild Foundation