Black Skin, Blue Books

The connections between the slave trade and its abolition in the United States and England have been amply documented. Those between African Americans and Celtic peoples and cultures, however, remain under-explored. Black Skin, Blue Books begins with a comparative chapter on the Victorian era in Wales and African America, before moving on to modernism and to the connections between Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison and the Welsh. It fills a void that most of us did not even know existed! This compelling and well-researched book is a major, fresh contribution to Black Atlantic Studies. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Daniel G. Williams' Black Skin, Blue Books is written with grace and uncommon insight. It is a model for transnational scholarship that opens up a new tributary of literary connection. By exposing moments of 'contact and comparison' between the literatures of black America and of Wales, Williams offers up surprising and necessary insights that defy our assumptions about race, place, and nation. I can think of few books that better illustrate the capacity of authors from very different parts of the world to arrive at what Ralph Ellison once termed 'those abiding patterns of experience' that help to define our shared sense of humanity. Adam Bradley, University of Colorado, Boulder; author of Ralph Ellison in Progress and Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. Daniel G. Williams explores passionately what at first blush seem like strange bedfellows - African Americans and the Welsh - until one dips inside this surprising book. Emerging from its pages is an intertwined but twisted history of struggle against discursive imperialism over centuries of misunderstanding and misapplied notions of who is literate, who is human. Williams reveals that African American and Welsh literary politics are not only connected by a discourse of Blackness, but by Welsh and Black performative traditions. Jeffrey C. Stewart, University of California at Santa Barbara; author of Paul Robeson: Artist as Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History.