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 Sissay In
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.
