Suchergebnisse

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison--these writers used words to create a livable world--a "home"--for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history's most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of--and resisted confinement in--the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation's founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people"--

Antislavery/antislave backlash : the white resistance to black Reconstruction -- The old Negro : race, science, literature, and the birth of Jim Crow -- Chains of being : the black body and the white mind -- Framing blackness : Sambo art and the visual rhetoric of white supremacy -- The United States of race : mass-producing stereotypes and fear -- The new Negro : redeeming the race from the redeemers -- Reframing race : a new Negro enters the frame -- Epilogue -- Reconstruction redux : the caricature assassination of the first black president.

Brazil : "May Exú give me the power of speech" -- Mexico : "The black grandma in the closet" -- Peru : the black soul of Peru -- The Dominican Republic : "Black behind the ears" -- Haiti : "From my ashes I rise; God is my cause and my sword" (motto on King Henri Christophe's Haitian flag, 1811-1820) -- Cuba : the next Cuban revolution

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated, landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship, and including more than eight hundred images--ancient maps, art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop on to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "Black Experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination"--

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr. s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the disciplines roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/orstradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course." -- from www.amazon.co.uk (Nov. 25, 2010)

In 1903, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois famously predicted that
the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color
line. Indeed, during the past century, matters of race were frequently
the cause of intense conflict and the stimulus for public policy
decisions not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The
founding of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on
Race at the beginning of the twenty-first century acknowledges the
continuing impact of Du Bois's prophecy, his pioneering role as
one of the founders of the discipline of sociology in the American
academy, and the considerable work that remains to be done as we
confront the "problem" that Du Bois identified over a
century ago.

Discussed in an interview with Gates are the prospects for multiculturalism in the US. It is argued that, while capitalism is a neutral system, the US has been historically racist; however, the tools of capitalism may be used to advance the goals of multiculturalism. Questions of multiculturalism in the creation of academic canons are explored, & Gates's works, The Signifying Monkey, Loose Canons, & Colored People, are discussed. J. Ferrari