Parking Lot Construction: As part of our ongoing work to maintain and improve Central Library, the parking lot will be closed for construction from Tuesday, July 28, to Saturday, August 1. Visit the Central Library page for more details. 

CLOSURE: Central Library will be closed Tuesday, July 21, through Saturday, July 25, while emergency repairs are made to the building’s cooling system. We expect to reopen Monday, July 27.

Notice of Public Meeting: Kalamazoo Public Library Board of Trustees | July 27 | 5:30 pm | Central Library/Van Deusen Room. The packet of information for the meeting can be found on the library’s website. 

Book

Mounted : on horses, blackness, and liberation

Call Number

  • 305.896 K146 (CEN, POW)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York, NY : Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2025.

Physical Description

xv, 175 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Summary

"Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, a thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses which reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture. Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life. In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines. Alternatively playful and critical, meditative and biting, these essays navigate time and place-- from the shadows of racetracks where jockey culture and the ubiquity of "equestrian chic" was born, to the reclamation-- or, in Lil Nas X's word, yeehawification-- of the image of the cowboy, to the fraught connections of equestrian sport to slavery, US militarization, and European colonial domination. At heart, Kalli probes a central question: What does it mean for Black people to ride and tend horses in the context of a culture that has also used horses against them? Throughout these essays, Kalli reflects on the experience of being the only Black member of the equestrian team at Columbia University, and how the aesthetics, ethos, and practice of horse stewardship contributed to their understanding of gender, sexuality, and radical community building. Mounted moves beyond the reductive stereotypes that dominate our perceptions of "horse people"-- the swaggering masculinity, snooty elitism, and assumed whiteness-- to reveal how Black people relate to the image and physical presence of the horse in nature and culture, considering violence, sexualization, power, migration, and more through its image."--

Subjects

Genres

Essays.