The Black Box

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780593299807 Author(s): Henry Louis Gates Format: Paperback Language: English Year: 2025 Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc Pages: 304

Description: A New York Times Notable Book A?� Shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Christian Gauss Award for Outstanding Books in Literary ScholarshipA?Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.A? A? Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and CasteA?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.A? A?The New York TimesA magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with one another, over the course of the countryA?s historyDistilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.A?s, legendary Harvard introductory course in African American studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-deAZ¬nition 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 MorrisonA?these writers used words to create a livable world, a home, for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a group formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal subhuman bondage transformed itself through the word into a community joined in overcoming one of historyA?s most pernicious lies. Out of that contested ground has AZ¬owered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture o