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The Strangers : Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them
by Ekow Eshun (Author)
Format:Paperback / softback 400 pages
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN:9780241990698
Published:26 Jun 2025
Classifications:Biography: arts & entertainment, Collected biographies, Social & cultural history, Social discrimination & inequality, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Black & Asian studies
Weight:276g
Dimensions:197 x 130 x 27 (mm)
Pub. Country:United Kingdom
For sale in: Spain, United Kingdom, AU, Ireland, Germany, (See full list)
Other Formats
Hardback CD-Audio EA
Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2025LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home. 'Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book' Bernardine Evaristo'Luminous and extraordinary... This book will be referenced for years to come' Lemn SissayIn the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger.
Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type.
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask?In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer.
Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer.
Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.
