The poet and essayist on the history of black performance, the meaning of miracles and the enigmatic brilliance of Whitney Houston
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (2016), was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer book prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright legacy award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us(2017), was named a book of the year by O, the Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork and the Chicago Tribune among others. His 2019 follow-up, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest,debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book, A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, weaves together moments of personal recollection with a profound meditation on the performances of black American artists from Josephine Baker to Beyoncé.
So what inspired you to write a book about black performance?
I’d gotten into reading about minstrelsy and minstrel shows – journals of old minstrel show performers, some of them talking about how they did not only feel shame when performing. That interested me. I was raised of course to imagine the minstrel show as only shameful. But in a way, for these performers who were either recently enslaved or were coming from a people who were enslaved, the stage was where they had a little bit of power, even if they had to dehumanise themselves in the process. I was fascinated by that and by who then got to define what was and wasn’t shameful, and I got to thinking about how often black performance and black performers now are considered as shameful only when pushed through the lens of what whiteness deems as appropriate, as upstanding.
I’ve written about Whitney Houston a lot and every time I return to her I come to a different conclusion
Related: From Soul Train to Beyoncé: the joy of black performance in America
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