Season 2: Hanif Abdurraqib in Conversation with Casey Bailey

In this week’s episode we welcome American essayist, cultural critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib, who talks to our very own Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Hanif’s book offers a beautiful insight into the history of black performance and culture in America, including cultural icons such as Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Dave Chappelle. Join Hanif and Casey as they talk about the process of writing a book that combines memoir with history and that is a real love letter to black cultural art and performance.

You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. 

For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

BLF Series 2, Episode 2: Hanif Abdurraqib 

Intro

Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond. 

You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org. 

In this week’s episode we welcome American essayist, cultural critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib, who talks to our very own Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Hanif’s book offers a beautiful insight into the history of black performance and culture in America, including cultural icons such as Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Dave Chappelle. Join Hanif and Casey as they talk about the process of writing a book that combines memoir with history and that is a real love letter to black cultural art and performance. 

Casey Bailey 

Hello, wonderful people. My name is Casey Bailey. And I am blessed and privileged to be here with Hanif Abdurraqib to talk about his latest book, A Little Devil in America. Now, Hanif is a prize-winning poet, essayist, cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, is the author of the highly praised poetry collections, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, and A Fortune for Your Disaster, the essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and the New York Times bestseller Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. Hanif, how are you today?

Hanif Abdurraqib

I'm good, Casey, thanks for hanging out.

Casey Bailey 

It's an absolute blessing and a pleasure. So, I mean, it's great for me being able to have this conversation with you. I always joke, I've done a couple of interviews now for Birmingham Literature Festival. And I get the kind of pleasure of asking you these questions that really are just secretly things I want to know before anybody else gets to hear the answers. And hopefully they enjoy it, too. So, I'm going to kind of jump in with what might be quite a big question or quite a complex question. But it's the one that kind of circulates in my head, thinking about this book, is how would you define this book? And I'll tell you why I ask before I put the pressure on you to answer it. Having read this book, it's one of those books that instantly there are people who I know, I feel like need to read this book. And so, when I say to them, you've got to read this book and they say, what’s it about or what is it, it's actually about so much and it is so much. I wonder how do you define what you've created here?

Hanif Abdurraqib

Oh, yeah, that's very kind. Thank you. I mean, I think for me, the best way to define the book is that it's a multitudinous exploration of performance, and what performance is in the very ways of performance, the many ways that performance shows up. Not on a stage or not on a screen, or not necessarily for an audience of anyone, but an audience of the performance I'm making, which is why there are essays in the book about spades or about complicated performances of affection or these kinds of things. I want to think about every route I've ever taken to a type of performance. For better or worse, sometimes for worse.

Casey Bailey

Yeah, so, one of the things that really struck me, having read the book, I went in and started kind of thumbing through the acknowledgments and stuff. And in the acknowledgments, you credit two people in particular that I noticed. You credit Maya Millet for, you say, steering the book in - and I apologize because I'm paraphrasing – in a new or better direction. And Ben Greenberg, and everyone at Random House for sticking with the book while it shifted, I think, is the word you use. What I'd really love to know is how much of a journey has the book been on from kind of the inception in your mind to what it became? And could you maybe map out some of that journey for us?

Hanif Abdurraqib

Yeah, I mean, initially, the book was going to be about, or the book was going to at least kind of revolve around appropriation and blackface in the history of minstrelsy. But I very quickly realized that that was not a pleasurable experience, like writing about that. I was centring whiteness more than I wanted to, and I didn't really find myself too keen on centring whiteness at that level. So, I began to ask myself a better question, which is a question of, what would this book look like if I extracted that desire to kind of make sense of - or tried to unravel the desires of whiteness as its projected upon black performers and black performance. And if I did that, could I get to a more pleasureful examination of what I have loved about performing and performances and watching performances. And I think that is essentially what ended up happening. You know, that's what ended up kind of, when I sat down Maya, who edited the book with me, and we began to ask questions of who the book was for and what the book wanted to celebrate. That became, you know, a lot clearer to me. And it made the book easier to edit. And it made the book a more exciting book to write, when I decentred the actual history of whiteness.

Casey Bailey

Amazing. And I think that it's interesting that you say that process wouldn't have necessarily been a pleasurable one, or wasn't a pleasurable one, kind of looking through that lens of how has whiteness impacted, or how has whiteness appropriated what we see of black culture. But what's interesting is, even having said that, the book is not just a collection of happiness, either. It has so many sombre and heavy notes, but it's carried by, you know, this real kind of idea of joy, which really is kind of like the metaphor for what you were just saying flows through the book of these punches of real happiness. And the...