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The Empire of the Mind
| Article
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11433 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
2,289 Words |
| Author
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Gerald Early
Gerald Early is professor of English and director of African
and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St.
Louis. He is the author of Tuxedo Junction: Essays on
American Culture and editor of My Soul's High Song: The
Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem
Renaissance and Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity,
and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. |
W.E.B. DU BOIS
Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
David Levering Lewis
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993
735 pp., $35.00
There has been no time in America, since African Americans became a politically self-conscious group, that they and the whites who have taken an active interest in America's future have not passionately promoted "genius" within the race. Such early historians of blacks as Lydia Maria Child in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), William Wells Brown in The Black Man (1863) and The Rising Son (1874), Harriet Beecher Stowe in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854), and James W.C. Pennington in A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841) located the race's genius in blacks of great achievement.
Later writers from George Washington Williams and Booker T. Washington to Carter G. Woodson and J.A. Rogers emphasized the careers of the gifted. These works were largely intended to build up African Americans' self-esteem, to counter their image as a people who had been denigrated as having no achievements or mental capacity. These books had little to do, in most cases, with constructing an intellectual genealogy or history of African American thought. Indeed, the blacks who wrote these works were more likely to become the subject of such a history than to be the creators of its historiography.
In recent years, however, scholars have seriously examined, first, what constitutes the history of African American thought, and second, what constitutes the African American mind, considered both as a theoretical construct in itself and as the theoretical constructs that are its products. Their books have attempted to define the preoccupations and function of African American intellectuals within the national black community, the white world, the academy, and the wider arenas of public discourse in America.
The 1960s and early '70s were crucial in producing such histories. The most important work of that era was Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), a thoroughgoing Marxist-cum-nationalist analysis of the failed history of the black intellectual in the twentieth century. According to Cruse, that failure resulted from the pressures exerted by, on, and through a philistine and politically reactionary black middle class and association with the white Left, which used blacks
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