wobblegong

Thinkin' about animals....

  • 🐟/🐠/they/them

deviantArt: jWobblegong

*tiny furry cheeps*


I finished "Now You See Me!: an introduction to 100 years of Black design" by Charlene Prempeh today. The book sets out to discuss the individual & general successes and struggles of Black people in roughly three realms: fashion, architecture & "design" (not quite the fine arts but ranging from newspaper comics to advertisements to movie posters). I would rate it as tremendously solid and I also found it very accessible to me, someone who knows shit-all about fashion and architechture in general.


In terms of time range it never looked further back than the 20th century, but everything from there to 2022 was covered pretty thoroughly. Geographically it hit what I'll call "everywhere that would occur to me given the subject": the USA, inevitably, but also the UK, the Caribbean, and Africa itself. Given the breadth of topic, time period, and location it is necessarily more of a sampler platter than a deep dive, but what a good sampler platter that is! Also the first time I saw a citation to an Instagram post from 2022 I think I bluescreened for 0.25 sec.

It's obviously well-researched but so far from dry: the author has too much passion and too much to say for this to be a boring read. (It's also a very handsome book, which I would not otherwise mention but the author has a working relationship with Polymode, the BIPOC design studio responsible for the book's design and they are discussed a bit in one of the chapters on Black designers. Quite fun to see someone mention people nailing it while holding a physical demonstration of as much.) I would not call it a light or fluffy book, as by necessity it deals heavily with the racism holding Black people back, but I felt it wasn't too heavy either: there's some rage and sorrow, but there's also some stand-out successes to talk about. I felt it was well-balanced.

The closest I come to a critique is the same critique I'd level at any sampler platter: there's not enough time to dig into everything as deeply as would really scratch my itch. Sometimes the author has to skate over a topic that could be it's own entire book, or three books, in a single paragraph. This is the nature of the beast! To its credit it felt earned here because it was so meaty, so again, not really a complaint, or at least no moreso than "I wish there were more hours in a day."

That said, the first two sections were kind of brain-weird for me personally because the book talks openly and conspicuously about race and racism– that is the point!– but it never openly says a single word about class and classism. That was... kind of an enormous thing to look away from given the chosen subjects, at least to me. I'm not sure I'd call it unfair or a fault of the book, exactly? And I think if I'd read it a year earlier I might not have caught it at all, USAmericans being staggeringly blind to class/classism as they are. But it did leave me feeling like someone was rubbing smooth paper against my brain as the pages rolled past decrying all the barriers against making it in the fashion world while Black without ever breathing a single word about class. Architecture was modestly better just because so much of it focused on Africa proper– different landscape I know even less about = less sensation of (forgive me) an elephant in the room.

Relatedly, I think it was more a consequence of having to cover so much so fast, but at times I also felt like the book was inadvertently implying a universality of Black experience that gave me pause. I will take for granted that there's commonalities between cultures and continents, absolutely, but there were times where I wondered if the brush was painting rather too broadly. Then again, see above about the nature of the sampler platter, so whatever.

All in all very good book and I'm glad the jazzy cover tempted me into giving it a try. If you like learning about talented Black people and the things they did/have done I recommend it! Now if you'll excuse me I need to go see if I can find all the comics Jackie Ormes made because the few showcased in the book looked great.


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