Horizon Information Portal

HSPLS site

eBooks/Audiobooks

Reading Program

The Black box : writing the race / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

by Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., author.

View full image

New York : Penguin Press, 2024.

African American authors.

African Americans in literature.

African Americans -- Race identity -- History.

African Americans -- Intellectual life -- History.

African Americans -- Intellectual life.

United States -- Race relations -- History.

9780593299784 (hardcover) :

0593299787 (hardcover) :

xxxvii, 262 pages ; 22 cm

Preface: The black box -- Race, reason, and writing -- What's in a name? -- Who's your daddy? : Frederick Douglass and the politics of self-representation -- Who's your mama? : the politics of disrespectability -- The "true art of a race's past" : art, propaganda, and the new negro -- Modernism and its discontents : Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright play the dozens -- Sellouts vs. race men : on the concept of passing -- Conclusion: Policing the color line.

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884

Powered by Dynix

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal