Africana

This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the black liturgical occasions we now have on the calendar that beg for special schoolchild reports of one sort or another: the King holiday, Black History Month, Black Music Month, Kwanzaa, Malcolm X's birthday, Juneteenth), and while not every school does all of this, most schools must do some of this. (And this, of course, has nothing to do with the occasional racial killing or major protest that took place or may be taking place somewhere that require a report and discussion in a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of use, to be sold to virtually every school, public, and university library in the country, as well as to a number of churches, to say nothing of the private homes that will have a copy right next to the Britannica. (In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies (politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral imperative.)

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It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of "the coming of the white man") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture. Encyclopedias, after all, are middlebrow, bourgeois books that tend, in the end, not to promote intellectual inquiry on the part of the people who use them but rather to stifle it. Children tend to copy verbatim from such books without ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much serving the anti-intellectual ends of the middlebrow, who want not to encounter knowledge and to wrestle with it but to store it as an authority on the bookshelf.

But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting or if they have never seen a film by D. W. Griffith or Fritz Lang. How terrible at a party to discover that one has never seen The Grand Illusion--one of the all-time great films--or that one has not read, alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What most thinking people in black studies find dangerous about the middlebrow apotheosis of the field is that it usually leads to the enshrinement of what Jacques Barzun calls thought-clichés, half-truths or non-truths that are accepted as the truth because someone said so in some reference book like Africana. Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.

Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana, where Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order. It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana. Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in 10 years.

That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia "a Holy Grail." More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.

But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts and objects, more "education" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with a black point of view with ever-increasing regularity--and a great deal to do with the shift that has taken place within the black population of the United States in the last 25 years and the dramatic change in its status. This book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an elite and the anti-intellectualization of black experience by the public at large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become) and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about "struggle" and "resistance."

I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana, those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.

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This week, a discussion of Africana, the encyclopedia and CD-ROM edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Anthony Appiah (click hereto buy it). Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently completing a book about Fisk University and an anthology about Sammy Davis Jr. David Nicholson is a Washington writer.

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