Tradition and the Black Atlantic

June 28, 2010
Prolific 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.

September 15, 2010
The culture wars are likely most remembered as the conflicts between liberals and conservatives that started on American campuses and spilled out into the broader American society, arguments over whether or not the educational canon should focus so much on dead white men to debates about making cultural and social space for minority rights and gay marriage. Scholar Gates expands on notions of the culture wars to examine how clashes between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism have played out in the U.S. and Britain from the Harlem Renaissance through the British black arts movement of the 1980s. Along the way, he explores the work of writer Richard Wright, social theorist Stuart Hall, anti-colonialist Edmund Burke, poet Amiri Baraka, filmmaker Spike Lee, and others. He explores the culture wars at play within the beloved black nationalist icon Franz Fanon, as well as the contrasts between the black arts movement in the U.S. and Britain and the debate about the relationship between art and the common people. While at times a bit too academic, Gates is also personal and playful in exploring diaspora aesthetics.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)