9780465014101
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Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora share button
Henry Louis, Jr. Gates Jr.
Genre African Americans
Format Hardcover
Dimensions 5.80 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 1.00 (d)
Pages 224
Publisher Basic Books
Publication Date August 2010
ISBN 9780465014101
Book ISBN 10 0465014100
About Book

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 the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors—tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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. (Sept.)