BROWN

A timely and intelligent look at what it means to be brown in the early 21st century

Exploring the many social, political, economic and personal implications of being a brown-skinned person in the world now, in the past, and in the immediate future, BROWN is packed with storytelling and on-the-street reporting that reveals a multitude of lives and stories. It also contains striking research about immigration, workers' lives and conditions, and the slow rise of “Brown Power.”

It's also a personal book; as the author studies the significance of their brown skin for those whose countries of origin include North Africa and the Middle East, Mexico and Central America, and South and East Asia, he also reflects on his own identity and experiences as a brown-skinned person (in his case from Yemen) and on the various meanings brown skin colour has for the world we live in. As he says in his proposal:

“Brown is not white. Brown is not black. Brown is an experience, a state of mind, a continuum – a Filipino caregiver in Toronto, a Syrian refugee in Copenhagen, a Mexican working under the table in Palm Springs, a Sri Lankan asylum seeker anywhere... It's a Filipina domestic worker dreaming of buying a new smart phone to replace the one with the Scotch-taped screen that she's too self-conscious to use in front of me. It's the cleaning lady from South Asia or Central America in the downtown New York City or Chicago office building whose name no one knows. After all, you only see her when you work late into the evening... It's the Egyptian parking-lot attendant on Eighth Avenue in New York scrambling to meet the demands of post-show crowds. It's the over-accomplished Pakistani engineering university professor about whose accent students have complained. It's the pool of temporary guest workers who, in so many countries around the world, do the work that very few natives want to do or could afford to live on.”

Kamal Al-Solaylee's previous book INTOLERABLE: A Memoir of Extremes (2012) examined the ideological shifts in the Arab World from the 1950s to the uprisings in 2011 through the story of his family. It was a finalist for five literary awards, including the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Lambda Literary Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction. It won the 2013 Toronto Book Award. It was also one of the five finalists for the 2015 Canada Reads, an annual competition by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to select one book for the nation to read. Kamal is a tenured associate professor and the former undergraduate program director at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University, Toronto. Previously he was the theatre critic at the Globe and Mail.