It’s the job of art and culture to hold up a mirror to reality and to shape what we want to see. This year, one of the US’s highest artistic honors shows a nation grappling with its own bloody, racist past through literature.
Yesterday and today the National Book Foundation, which gives out the country’s biggest book prizes, announced its nonfiction and fiction longlists. Several of those 20 books show a nation trying to understand its own dark history, through topics like eugenics, prison, and war. Five books focus on the US’s racist past, the most prominent theme.
In fiction, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (the year’s most highly anticipated non-wizarding fiction book) is a slave narrative that begins on a cotton plantation in Georgia and traces its main character’s way north.
On the nonfiction list, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez investigates the secret history of the slavery of Native Americans, starting with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in what came to be the US. In The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, Manisha Sinha looks at the many groups across American history that fought for abolition.
In Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice, she shows how aspiring writer Pauli Murray shaped Eleanor Roosevelt’s views on social justice and segregation in the country. And in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X $TWTR. Kendi traces the intellectual history of anti-black racism in the US.
See the nominee lists in full:
