Africana

Dear Gerald:

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

We're probably more in accord on Africana than not, but I think you were too easy on Gates. Years ago, before blackness became really marketable, it used to be said that the publishing industry would admit only one black writer at a time. Langston Hughes was succeeded by Richard Wright, who in turn was succeeded by James Baldwin. A few years ago, we thought that notion was disproved when Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan were simultaneously on the bestseller list. Then along came Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr.

He's the modern-day impresario of black culture, the Joyce Carol Oates of black studies, producing with daunting regularity. James Brown used to be called the hardest-working man in show business, but he ain't got nothing on Gates.

Would somebody puh-leeze stop him before he writes again?

Unlike you, I don't labor in the fields of black culture, and I'm glad--though as a fiction writer who keeps hearing rumors that Gates is working on a novel, I'm constantly checking my rear-view mirror for his headlights. You guys are in an unenviable place. Gates must seem like he's everywhere. Still and all, I wonder how much of his work will survive, and whether, in a hundred years, say, anyone will read anything by Gates, in the same way we still read The Souls of Black Folk.

Oh, well. At least Gates had the decency not to include himself in his own encyclopedia. Or did I miss that entry?

I wish he'd left out bell hooks and Cornel West, though, two prominent public intellectuals (that's what they call people who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lecture the rest of us about what we're doing wrong). There are biographies of both, though, thankfully, we only have to read about hooks. Not so with West. He writes a 15-page "interpretation" of W.E.B. Du Bois. (I think what "interpretation" really means is that, like Gates, West wants to be Du Bois when he grows up.) But why West and not David Levering Lewis? Lewis is an award-winning historian (not a preacher manqué), and though only one volume has been published, his is already the standard biography of Du Bois.

I suppose the explanation is that when you get to be HNIC, as Gates has, you reward your friends and ignore everyone else. Which would explain why there's nothing here on Ward Connerly, Stanley Crouch, Glenn Loury, or Thomas Sowell. I couldn't even find anything on black conservatism.

Of course, I'd rather have Africana than not, but did they have to be so slavishly politically correct and populist? There are at least three articles on homosexuality, including one titled "Homosexuality in Africa: An Interpretation" (there's that word again!), and the popularization begins on the box with a blurb from Michael Jordan. (And I thought he was just a basketball player and TV huckster.)

There's an entry on rap music (what an oxymoron!). I suppose you could make an argument that it's a significant enough phenomenon, so that it deserves to be here. But what's the rationale for separate biographical entries on Queen Latifah, Snoop Doggy Dog, Tupac Shakur, and a host of other dubious thugs? And what about Rupaul? Why is he here? I thought he'd already used up his 15 minutes of fame.

And what would Du Bois have made of that?

You think black studies has achieved middlebrow status. I'm less sanguine that many whites feel bad when they don't know something about black history and culture. Years ago, a white woman told me about how her son's teacher let the class dance to a Michael Jackson record for 10 minutes to celebrate Black History Month. And I wonder whether the choice of reviewers here--we're both black--doesn't say something that makes me uncomfortable and, well, a little bit angry.

We'll be closer when we have two white reviewers, or a Korean and a Jew. Black history--in America, at least--is American history. There ought to be room in the retelling of it for the letters Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass exchanged, for the similarities between Invisible Man and Ben Franklin's Autobiography, for the presence of Charles Chesnutt at the banquet to honor Twain shortly before the latter's death, and for the monument in Mississippi to the slaves who rode with a band of Confederate irregulars.

Sadly, I don't find that here,
David

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

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.

SPONSORED CONTENT