The Black Box

Writing the Race

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Hardback

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English

Allen Lane
14 May 2024

Literary studies: from c 1900 -; History; Social & cultural history; Social groups; Black & Asian studies

A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, by one of the nation's major literary critics

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard 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 liveable world - a ""home"" - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. 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 that this ""nation within a nation"" has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Imprint: Allen Lane
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 222mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 422g
ISBN: 9780241678503
ISBN 10: 0241678501
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 14 May 2024
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Henry Louis Gates Jr is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored more than twenty books and created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans- Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction- America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. His most recent PBS documentary is Gospel.

Reviews for The Black Box: Writing the Race

The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature -- Tope Folarin * The New York Times *