Cole, a photographer, novelist, essayist, cultural and social critic, is currently the Gore Vidal Professor the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.  In the Preface to this, his eighth book, he writes that his goal is to address “the fractures of our recent history through a constellation of interrelated concerns”.   That constellation is quite eclectic and includes chapters on artists as varied as Caravaggio whose travels in Italy and Malta in the early 1600’s Cole retraces  (interestingly, this is the third consecutive book which has landed me in the transition from the 16th to the 17th Centuries.  why?), explorations of the contemporary art of Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson; elegies for Edward Said, John Berger, Tomas Transtromer (Nobel Prize winning Swedish poet), I.M. Pei, Hasse Mady Diabate (a singer from Mali), and Aretha Franklin; and a fascinating exploration of the black panther’s genetic origins sparked by a visit to the zoo in Sao Paulo.

In each of these essays, Cole is exploring his own blackness and origins. Born in the U.S. but soon taken by his parents back to their home in Nigeria, he lived in Africa until the age of 17 when he returned to the U.S. Through his engagement with the work of these authors, painters, singers, and others, he struggles to understand his own multi-national identity, though always through the lens of his blackness, the eponymous black paper upon which his days are inscribed.

Cole is an important contemporary cultural and literary critic whose work is well written, deeply researched, and offers incisive insights into our current social struggles.  Worth reading.