Full Description
Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking. Making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. This volume moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life. This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation.
Contents
Introduction, Adolph Reed Jr., Kenneth W. Warren; Part I Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment; Chapter 1 Frederick Douglass's Life and Times, Kenneth W. Warren; Chapter 2 "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others", Judith Stein; Part II The Jim Crow Era; Chapter 3 How Black "Folk" Survived in the Modern South, William P. Jones; Chapter 4 An Inevitable Drift?, Kenneth W. Warren; Chapter 5 The Educational Alliance and the Urban League in New York, Touré F. Reed; Chapter 6 The Chicago School of Human Ecology and the Ideology of Black Civic Elites, Preston H. Smith II; Chapter 7 "What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish", Michele Mitchell; Chapter 8 Black Power Nationalism as Ethnic Pluralism, Dean E. Robinson; Part III The Post-Jim Crow Era; Chapter 9 The Postmodern Moment in Black Literary and Cultural Studies, Madhu Dubey; Chapter 10 The "Color Line" Then and Now, Adolph Reed Jr.; conclusion Conclusion, Adolph Reed Jr., Kenneth W. Warren;
