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The Black Box: Writing the Race
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 5 reviews on
"Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions." -- Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste
"This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature."
--The New York Times
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 one another, 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 group formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal subhuman bondage transformed itself through the word into a community joined in overcoming one of history's most pernicious lies. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture of people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be Black, and about how best to use the past to create 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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Penguin Press
- Publish Date: Mar 19th, 2024
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.60in - 1.20in - 1.00lb
- EAN: 9780593299784
- Categories: • African American & Black• American - African American & Black• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - African American & Bl
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About the Author
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Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"These reflections are elegant entrees into the debates that Black Americans have conducted in their long quest for self-definition. The Black Box succeeds not because it contains novel facts but because Gates's gloss on the established history glimmers. He proposes that it is by narrating and naming--that is, by writing--that Black Americans have shattered the narrow boxes in which they have so often been imprisoned. By writing about this writing, he, too, pens his way free." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"An absolute tour de force . . . A study in the art, intellect, and inherent contradictions that define the making of a people." --Elle
"A lively and wide-ranging literary history of Black American self-definition." --TLS
"Gates tracks questions of class, language, aesthetics, and resistance in a manyfaceted, clarifying, era-by-era chronicle propelled by vivid considerations of such influential Black writers as Phillis Wheatley, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison . . . A call to protect the free exchange of ideas in the classroom and beyond." --Booklist (starred review)
"A must for scholars, yet still accessible to general audiences, by arguably the preeminent scholar of African American studies. This gem brilliantly reflects multiple depictions of what it means to be a Black American amid complex, structured interracial and color-based discrimination discourses, in which writing and language are keys." --Library Journal (starred review)
"Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions." --Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents