Overlayering periods in American history in order to highlight the cyclical nature of its racial conflicts and to glean insight from earlier Black artists, intellectuals and leaders into managing the despair engendered by the most recent conflagration is what structures Eddie Glaude’s powerful, genre-defying work.

Published in the UK in 2021, with an introduction written on the eve of the US election, without foreknowledge, but surely a feeling in the bones, of Trump’s subsequent attempts to overturn the results of that election by discarding ballots cast by Black voters in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit, and by summoning a militia of white men (and a few women) bearing symbols of the Confederacy and shouting the ugliest of racist language as they stormed the Capitol nine weeks later, Begin Again affords the reader the opportunity to experience its resonances in several temporal dimensions at once.

The resulting book was published in the US two years later, just as George Floyd’s death beneath the knee of a Minneapolis policeman ignited national and international protests, fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement and brought the American president’s white supremacist beliefs, policies and – implicitly or explicitly – voters into their sharpest focus yet, all this heading into the cauldron of the 2020 presidential election season. Begin Again represents a search for hope written from inside the despair felt by its author, a professor of American studies at Princeton, at what turned out to be the midway point of the Trump presidency.

Begin again eddie glaude review