The book, Four Hundred Souls, provides the lyrics for a new epic song, written in 2019, a spiritual which documents a ‘soulful history’. Kendi mentions, in his introduction, the old spiritual: ‘We shall overcome”.

It all sounds quite romantic and yet it works: everyone must focus, in a few words, on half a decade of their history, whilst voicing personal ideas. He and co-editor, historian Keisha Blain, have taken pains to celebrate diversity in their invitations to people: those ‘who identify (or are identified) as women and men, cisgender and transgender, younger and older, straight and queer, dark-skinned and light-skinned’. They are all Black.Įvery piece is relatively equal in length and in this way the ‘historians, journalists, activists, philosophers, novelists, political analysts, lawyers, anthropologists, curators, theologians, sociologists, essayists, economists, educators, poets and cultural critics’ make up a ‘choir’. From his work, and undoubtedly from his own life experience, Kendi knows what it is to be oppressed. Kendi is founding director of the Boston University Centre for Antiracist Research and has been named, by Time magazine, as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. That was before the Mayflower docked in 1620, an arrival for which a national holiday is designated. And thus Four Hundred Souls celebrates the 400 th anniversary of the two dozen Ndongo people, kidnapped from what is now Angola, who disembarked from the White Lion at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Each of the 10 decades has 8 pieces and a poem as a coda. They are not, obviously, the first to undertake such a task but they are the only ones who have gathered 80 contributors. Blain have produced a history of Black America which circumvents the prevailing white accounts. An (American) Woman Without a Country: Erin A.Ottoman/Persian Empires and Moroccan Sultanateįollow me on Twitter My Tweets Blogs I Follow.African Literature American history American Literature Australian literature biography book reviews Canadian Literature Cork city Daniel Kaluuya English history Essays French Art French Literature Historical fiction International politics Irish history Irishness Irish politics Irish writing Literary detective novel Literature of the First World War memoirs Mexican Literature Music philosophy Science writing short stories sonnet reviews The Referendum on the Regulation of the Termination of Pregnancy Uncategorized Tags

4 hundred souls