The Grey Album (book)
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| Author | Kevin Young |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
Publication date | March 13, 2012 |
| Pages | 476 |
| ISBN | 978-1555976071 |
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness is a 2012 collection of essays in cultural criticism by Kevin Young.[1][2] The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.[3]
The Grey Album places the figure of the trickster near the center of African-American (and thus, American) literary history. Young traces this lineage from Phillis Wheatley through Jay-Z,[4] arguing that the act of lying—the counterfeit, or what Young calls "storying"—forms an essential genre of self-invention in the African-American literary and musical tradition.[4] As David Shields notes in his New York Times review, Young rejects white critics' preoccupation with "authenticity", saying such criticism fails even before it begins to engage the work:
[W]hite critics who read slave narratives "simply in terms of authenticity do two quite damaging things: first, they read (white) skepticism back into the slave's writing and thus limit the 'freedom' of black authorship; second, they ignore or downplay the African-American trickster tradition, itself related to black rhetorical strategies like lying." It is not just creation per se but specifically creation of the counterfeit that "provides a means of black acquisition of authority (even as so-called authenticity is called into question)."[4][5]
Young writes that "counterfeit is the way in which black folks forge—both 'create' and 'fake'—black authority in a world not necessarily of their making."[6]
