Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline’s roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke.\ Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that...
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With erudition, wit, and grace, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. elucidates the roots and limitations of cultural studiesPublishers WeeklyProlific author, editor, host of PBS's Faces of America, and the Harvard professor who was arrested (mistakenly) for breaking into his own Cambridge home, Gates is probably the most famous professor in the U.S. While asserting that "accounts of the culture wars the stuff of undergraduate essays in English departments and Ph.D. theses," Gates offers four essays devoted to those wars as experienced in Britain's Black Arts Movement and at the advent of "cultural studies" in American universities. Readers accustomed to abstruse theory may find Gates's itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory and his assessment of "Spivak's critique of Benita Parry's critique of Abdul JamMohamed's critique of Homi Bhaba's critique of Edward Said's critique of colonial discourse" interesting, but this is definitely a book for the in-crowd--readers of Edmund Burke and those with some historical sense of Warren Hastings's trial might perk up.. In concluding this disordered farrago, Gates offers "two cheers for multiculturalism" and "an appeal for pluralism…of a singularly banal and uninspiring variety." A major disappointment from a major scholar. (Sept.)
\ Publishers WeeklyProlific author, editor, host of PBS's Faces of America, and the Harvard professor who was arrested (mistakenly) for breaking into his own Cambridge home, Gates is probably the most famous professor in the U.S. While asserting that "accounts of the culture wars the stuff of undergraduate essays in English departments and Ph.D. theses," Gates offers four essays devoted to those wars as experienced in Britain's Black Arts Movement and at the advent of "cultural studies" in American universities. Readers accustomed to abstruse theory may find Gates's itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory and his assessment of "Spivak's critique of Benita Parry's critique of Abdul JamMohamed's critique of Homi Bhaba's critique of Edward Said's critique of colonial discourse" interesting, but this is definitely a book for the in-crowd--readers of Edmund Burke and those with some historical sense of Warren Hastings's trial might perk up.. In concluding this disordered farrago, Gates offers "two cheers for multiculturalism" and "an appeal for pluralism…of a singularly banal and uninspiring variety." A major disappointment from a major scholar. (Sept.)\ \
