The Strangers Five Extraordinary Black Men and The Worlds Th

Ira Aldridge: trailblazing Shakespearean actor, playwright, abolitionist, acclaimed and feted across nineteenth century Europe. Matthew Henson: the first man ever to reach the North Pole, after eighteen years of successive attempts. Frantz Fanon: revolutionary psychologist and political philosopher, a forefather of modern post-colonial theory. Malcolm X: firebrand leader in the American civil rights movement, an icon in the fight for racial justice. Justin Fashanu: gifted sportsman and notorious showman, the first professional footballer in the world to come out publicly as gay. What do these five men, separated by centuries and continents, have in common? The Strangers tells their stories one by one: as pioneers who made history in their fields, and as sensitive, often solitary individuals moving through a hostile world. and it locates them within the vibrant, restless, richly detailed landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics over the past several centuries. Richly imaginative and powerfully empathetic, an intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men, and a meditation on race, estrangement and the search for home.''Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book'' Bernardine Evaristo''Luminous and extraordinary... This book will be referenced for years to come'' Lemn SissayIn the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type.What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? and what happens beneath the mask?In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. and he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.