The Black Box

Starred review from February 1, 2024

Literary scholar and historian Gates (Harvard Univ.; The Black Church) parses the words, sounds, images, and insinuations of the fraught and curious history of Black self-definition over the ages. Starting with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (1753-84) and jumping backward and forward in time from the 1500s to the present, Gates demonstrates the place of writing as proof in the debate--instigated and perpetuated by relentless racism--on the humanity of people of African descent. He shows writing by Black authors as works of resistance and creation, of fending off virulent white racism, and of forging viable Black communities and consciousness. He explains how--by claiming common citizenship and refuting Black people's debasement in the Great Chain of Being theory of ranked humanity--self-conscious and self-confident Black writers have contested the tropes that tried to constrain them. They also debated among themselves about labels, class distinctions, cultural origins, and connections. VERDICT 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.--Thomas J. Davis

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2024
A survey of Black writers' self-definitions. Renowned literary critic and historian Gates, author of Stony the Road and The Black Church, presents a brief survey of African American literature, with a focus on the search for liberatory conceptions of identity. His title plays on the metaphor of a black box to understand how Black writers have struggled to reconceive their confinement within hostile power structures and dispel a sense of Black inscrutability. The author seeks to understand "both the nature of the discursive world that people of African descent have created in this country...and how this very world has been 'seen' and 'not seen' from outside of it, by people unable to fathom its workings inside." Gates provides astute analysis of canonical figures, including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. He includes a distillation of his own decades-long scholarship on subversive strategies deployed in Black writing, vividly demonstrating how literature has played a crucial role in winning sociopolitical and imaginative, artistic freedom. We gain a memorable sense of how particular literary works contributed to abolition and quests for civil rights, the debunking of racist discourses, and the gradual formation of "a shared history, a shared culture." A consistent strength of the book is Gates' incisive descriptions of the debates arising from efforts to define personal and collective identities and chart paths to freedom. The author argues against any monolithic definition of Blackness and affirms an "irreducible" multiplicity of identities. "There are as many ways of being Black as there are Black people," he writes. In his conclusion, Gates connects the historical trajectory of Black writing to contemporary struggles, such as the ongoing debates across the nation about school curricula and the teaching of Black history. Clear, revealing commentary on Black America's literary achievements.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
The first black box Gates introduces is the box on his granddaughter's birth certificate his white son-in-law checks to identify her as Black, evidence of "the sheer, laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America." Slavery is another black box, racism and racial stereotypes another, with many black-box variations and metaphors surfacing throughout this redefining analysis of "the key debates that Black people have had with each other, within the black box, about its nature and function, but mostly about how to escape from it," and the role literature has played in this ongoing discussion. Based on the Introduction to African American Studies lectures that Gates presents at Harvard, this engagement with Black identities, movements, and intellectual and artistic creativity is propelled by profiles of Black women and men who "wrote themselves and their fellow persons of African descent into the human community." Gates tracks questions of class, language, aesthetics, and resistance in a many-faceted, 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. The "moral,"" Gates avers, ""is that there never has been one way to 'be Black.'" Gates concludes with a call to protect the free exchange of ideas in the classroom and beyond. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gates' latest vital work of Black history will be a must-read for his enthusiastic fans, while Gospel, his newest PBS documentary series, is a must-see.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.