Curtain and the Veil: Strategies in Black Drams (American Cultural Heritage Series, No 1)

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Readers and critics of Rick Moody generally praise the long and lyrical sentences, sarcastic wit, and meandering asides typical of his misunderstood but sensitive protagonists. For Moody fans who have come to appreciate the Holden Caulfieldesque pathos beneath the sense of urgency and big vocabulary in books like The Ice Storm and Demonology, his memoir The Black Veil will offer more of the same. What's different, however, is that this time the protagonist is Moody himself. The book, subtitled A Memoir with Digressions, reads at times like a delicious essay collection outlining Moody's Connecticut childhood (complete with recipes for the perfect lobster roll and significance of the wax bean), and at times like a work of passionate literary criticism. But whether Moody discusses the impact of his parents' divorce, his alcoholic excesses in college and Manhattan, his time at an inpatient psychiatric unit, or his obvious passion for literature, his memoir does what so many current works in this genre do not: it shows the author looking beyond himself, through literature, to a world larger and more spiritual than the one in which he lives.

The titular black veil refers to a Hawthorne story (appended) about a New England minister Moody believes may be a relative. Moody's book is not so much about his quest to research the story of the black veil, despite the trek he makes to Maine to do just that, as it is the account of his personal relationship to that story. While die-hard Moody fans may find the book a surprising departure, those who want to know him more intimately will enjoy accompanying him on this personal and intellectual journey. --Jane Hodges

Book Description

In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed. Woven through his own story, Moody also traces his familys paternal line, looking for clues to his own melancholyin particular to one ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, about whom Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an archetypal story of shame called The Ministers Black Veil. In a brilliant display that is no less than a literary tour de force, Moody ties past and present, family legend, and serious scholarship into a book that will draw comparisons not just to recent memoirs by Dave Eggers and Martin Amis but to forebears like Nabokovs Speak, Memory.

Customer Reviews:

Good. Period........2005-08-02

Now that time has passed, and the bad reviews are remembered best as, well, examples of bad reviewing, why not revisit The Black Veil, and read it on its own terms?

My guess is that you'll find, as I did, a really beautiful narrative, a work of sustained mystery, the kind of book (like the best of John Hawkes, W.G. Sebald, Marilynne Robinson) that will help the reader find a profound quiet, a meditative space, where comfort might be found in the complexities of things, and in finding a fellow traveler who whispers a familiar sad song.

So-so: A Review with No Digressions.......2004-09-14

Rick Moody's always been an author I admired. "The Ice Storm," obviously, is his best work in that his ranty style of writing found a perfect counterpart: the Watergate-era '70s. I've always admired his progressive use of punctuation (i.e. the comma, italicizing everything), run-on sentences and generally neurotic way of writing. There's something lyrical and sarcastic there, and it's not an easy way to tell a story--for either the writer or the reader. A style to marvel at, yes, but not always one you love (and one that sometimes dominates the story).

And that's where Moody falters in "The Black Veil," I suppose: outside of it's grad school-esque underlying structure, his memoir takes a whole lot of pages to say very, very little. "The Black Veil" is supposed to be an experimental memoir, in that it's not only about Moody's specific decline into various addictions and psychoses, but also a kind of wide-spread condemnation of America itself. Kind of like "The Ice Storm," except this time Moody's using source texts from the early Puritan days (an endless list of books which he annotates in the back), rather than the commercialism of the '70s.

Sounds intesting, right? Well... it's not, really. At times the source texts are compelling, but usually only in the stylized way Moody uses them (which avoids footnotes or even really telling you where the various quotes come from, other than sometimes italicizing them). It's kind of like in a pretty film (i.e. "Hero") where you find yourself marveling at the shot, rather than what's going on in the story. It's sad, but most of the time, the Puritan stuff is downright boring. The language is hard to get into, and it doesn't blend well with Moody's own story, which, as the memoir goes on, gets dominated by the Puritan stuff. Besides, if you want early American history, just go check out those books. Here, you get it in bits and pieces, which is frustrating within itself.

Why is there so much early New England history and analysis packed into Moody's memoir? Well, the basic idea he came up with is that he's vaguely related to Handkerchief Moody, a man who may or may not have been the central inspiration for Hawthorne's "The Minister of the Black Veil." ... Again, a compelling thesis, but one that is explored and ultimately concluded with about as much satisfaction as those papers you shortchanged yourself through while getting your Bachelor's.

I guess that's what makes this memoir, at the end of the day, one of those books you throw onto the "Back to the Used Bookstore" pile: it's intersting, sure, but there are tons of interesting books out there. And I get it: the themes, the attacks on America as violent and a people of colonizers, etc., I'm not stupid, I just don't really care b/c these themes were explored better elsewhere.

If you're getting your PHD in English or like early American history, along with analysis, get this book. But if you're just into memoirs, esp. addiction-related ones, you may feel as though you've been cheated. "The Black Veil" is much more of an "essay with digressions," than it is a "memoir."

If you want great memoirs, check out Jerry Stahl's "Permanent Midnight," or even Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," which was probably a minor inspiration for Moody. So I give the book two stars on my scale, which is five stars for a masterpiece, four for Top Tens of the year, three for simply good, two for average, and one for bad (but I don't read bad books).

Two stars. Interesting, but so-so.

I wanted to enjoy it..........2004-08-24

...and I did read the book from cover to cover. I was captivated by the interview that Moody did on NPR's Fresh Air and thought the book would offer more of the same. But where the radio interview offered an honest, intriguing look inward at depression and substance abuse, Moody's book was all over the place. The problem with the book wasn't so much a lack of restraint as a lack of any unifying theme.

I was fascinated by the premise of an author searching his family tree for clues to his own identity. Add to that Moody's writing style--dense, detailed, and intricately designed--and it certainly looked promising. I kept thinking that the ever-lengthening sentences, the eclectic array of allusions and references, and the somber subject matter would eventually pay off, but the book ended before this happened.

If this is starting to remind anyone of Faulkner, you're not far off; Moody's writing style has a lot in common with Faulkner on the surface. The two writers sound alike in a superficial way; however, where Faulkner eventually weaves his themes together in a way that is awe-inspiring, Moody just keeps on relating one esoteric (though well-worded) remembrance after another, with seemingly no reason for doing so.

I suppose all this could be easily explained away with the thought that this is a memoir, not a novel. Even so, by the book's end, I was desperately wishing someone had made free use of an editing pencil. It took a while to adjust to run-on sentences which composed entire paragraphs, which cover two and a half pages apiece. But near the end of the book, as Moody describes a visit to a rock quarry and then goes off on a purposeless tangent about concrete, I had had enough. I finished the book, but mainly so I could justify rendering a fully informed opinion on it. The Black Veil may bill itself as a memoir, but it best serves the function of a journal--a place to jot down all the disparate ideas that need to be recorded, so they can be used to better effect later.

italicized portrait of artist as young man.......2004-05-19

First off, I'm not a huge fan of Moody's italics. He writes so well that they seem unnecessary; they're the equivalent often of someone jabbing you with a pencil as you're trying to study. This memoir is almost interchangeable from all the others by young writers who tell their story of grappling with broken homes, mood disorders, breakdowns, etc. However, there is almost no emphasis on the author's career, instead we get page after page of quotes of a distant relative, Hankerchief Moody, whose odd life interests the author (although there is never any guarantee from the beginning that they are actually related). While this may sound like a way to keep the book from getting bogged down in too much "I" time, it doesn't really work. When the author stops quoting his relative, he digresses into ruminations about various subjects such as school shootings and William Burroughs.

To be fair, the reader is warned in the beginning about how the writer will digress. You can't say you haven't been warned. But by the time a writer pens a memoir, hopefully he or she is old enough to have pulled many of the threads together. Cliched though it is, Moody does not seem to have "come to terms" or had much closure on the rocky period he describes here. That would have helped. Or maybe just a skilled editor.

interesting departure for Moody.......2003-08-10

The "digressions" part of the subtitle primarily refers to the fact that this is not only a memoir but also a sort of family genealogy, or an attempt at one. Moody finds that he may be the descendant of a Reverend Moody who was fictionalized as the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." Digging through obscure histories and travelling about New England in an attempt to find out more about the man behind Hawthorne's self-loathing minister, Moody creates a sense of very powerful parallels to his own struggles with severe depression and drugs. These sections alternate without Moody making explicit connections between the two stories, but the format keeps the pages turning and the reader intrigued.

Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media

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A Tough Read
Excellent

Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media
Pamela Newkirk
Manufacturer: NYU Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Journalism | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0814758002
Release Date: 2002-09-01

Amazon.com

On the surface, the increase of African American reporters in the media may signal that they have made significant gains in that arena. But as Professor Pamela Newkirk of New York University outlines in her valuable book Within the Veil, race is still an issue that blacks have to deal with. Riffing on W.E.B. Du Bois' use of "the veil" in his classic book The Souls of Black Folk, Newkirk writes: "Behind the obvious, albeit small, numerical gains, a wide and deep racial and cultural chasm still divides blacks and whites in the newsroom. Despite their heightened visibility, African-American journalists and their minority counterparts, woefully underrepresented in the industry and in news management, are far from integrated into newsroom culture." Charting the development of the black press with the publication of Freedman's Journal in 1827, Newkirk chronicles the endless struggle of blacks to challenge the racist stereotypes that permeate American thought. She details the ordeals of several blacks in the '60s who desegregated TV networks, the most well known example being the late Max Robinson, brother of civil rights leader Randall Robinson. There's also the case of the disgraced Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who had to give back her Pulitzer Prize for writing a false story, while white writers guilty of the same crime are given jobs elsewhere. Newkirk also highlights the pressures black reporters feel from their racial group to tell the truth about Afro-American life, which at times goes against what their white counterparts believe. Newkirk also examines Black Entertainment Television and Net Noir, an Internet company, and writes, "African-Americans must use the power of praise and punishment to call attention to the ways in which they are portrayed." --Eugene Holley Jr.

Book Description

Winner of the National Press Club Prize for Media Criticism.

"A compelling look at the power of the media from an award-winning journalist who fearlessly and passionately addresses critical issues confronting African-American journalists working for mainstream newspapers and magazines."
--Essence

"In her eloquent take on media Eurocentrism, Pamela Newkirk observes that anti-African exclusion very much characterizes the major media. . . . An hermeneutical tour-de-force."
--New York Amsterdam News

"Newkirk's account is well-grounded historically and anecdotally, and she mangaes to be both fair and accurate at a time when those values seem to have lost their luster in the profession"Kirkus

Companion website: http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/authors/veil.html

Thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission Report made national headlines by exposing the consistently biased coverage afforded African Americans in the mainstream media. While the report acted as a much ballyhooed wake-up call, the problems it identified have stubbornly persisted, despite the infusion of black and other racial minority journalists into the newsroom.

In Within the Veil, Pamela Newkirk unmasks the ways in which race continues to influence reportage, both overtly and covertly. Newkirk charts a series of race-related conflicts at news organizations across the country, illustrating how African American journalists have influenced and been denied influence to the content, presentation, and very nature of news.

Through anecdotes culled from interviews with over 100 broadcast and print journalists, Newkirk exposes the trials and triumphs of African American journalists as they struggle in pursuit of more equitable coverage of racial minorities. She illuminates the agonizing dilemmas they face when writing stories critical of blacks, stories which force them to choose between journalistic integrity, their own advancement, and the almost certain enmity of the black community.

Within the Veil is a gripping front-line report on the continuing battle to integrate America's newsrooms and news coverage.

Customer Reviews:

A Tough Read.......2002-01-08

This is a very thoughtful and provocative read. Depending upon where one sits, it may not be easy to stomach. It is sobering, nontheless. It created in me a cynicism about the media, and it's purpose and meaning as holders of a public trust.

Excellent.......2001-06-11

This is a must-read book about the ways race influences the news we read in the newspapers and see on television. Everyone who cares about race and the future of our country should read this book!

The Blackman and the Veil: A Century On (W.E.B. Du Bois-Padmore-Nkrumah Pan-African Lectures Series)

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The Blackman and the Veil: A Century On (W.E.B. Du Bois-Padmore-Nkrumah Pan-African Lectures Series)
Wole Soyinka
Manufacturer: Sedco Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Africa | History | Subjects | Books

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 9964721218

Book Description

Lectures delivered by the Nobel Prize Winner, Wole Soyinka

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

Average customer rating:

A Worthy Read
Remembering Jim Crow
A necessary book
Reveals how blacks fought against the system
Slavery The Sequel

Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South
Robert Gavins , and Behind the Veil Project
Manufacturer: New Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (with MP3 Audio CD)
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A Short History of Reconstruction

ASIN: 1565846974

Book Description

The sequel to the award-winning Remembering Slavery, a groundbreaking book-and-CD set of interviews about the segregation-era South.

Remembering Jim Crow, the groundbreaking sequel to Remembering Slavery, is an extraordinary opportunity to read and hear the voices of black southerners who were firsthand witnesses to one of the most heartbreaking and troubling chapters in America's history. Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil project at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book-and-CD set presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever recorded of African American life in the racially segregated South.

In vivid, compelling stories, men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression—in the workplace, on street corners, and above all in the public facilities and institutions that systematically demeaned, disenfranchised, and disempowered black people, condemning them to second-class citizenship. At the same time, Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how black southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of survival enriched by vivid memories of individual, family, and community triumphs and tragedies.

Remembering Jim Crow is accompanied by two one-hour compact discs of the companion radio documentary produced by American RadioWorks. A transcript of the audio programs is included in the book's appendix, and the book is illustrated with fifty rare segregation-era photographs collected from African American families who participated in the oral history project. Boxed set: hardcover book with 2 one-hour compact discs; 50 black-and-white photographs.

Customer Reviews:

A Worthy Read.......2004-02-25

This is an interesting angle to present a sad era in America's history. This book does not give a history book type of fact presentation, it presents the facts from the people who actually experienced it.

This is a vital book if for only one reason, so that the children born after this era know what it was like so it is never repeated.

I enjoyed the oral history that is presentated and I would recommend this book if you want a greater understanding of this time.

Remembering Jim Crow.......2003-04-21

REMEMBERING JIM CROW is a colletion of first hand accounts of life in the Jim Crow south. The stories are compelling and at the same time sad.

The stories create the atmosphere that one is sitting in one of the elderly story tellers living room listening to them.

This book is especially worthwhile for non-African-Amercians readers, because virtually all African-Americans that have roots in the south, know these stories all too well.

A necessary book.......2002-10-08

This is an absolutely superb book, comprised of recollections of the Jim Crow years in the form of oral histories. It can be read through, or picked up at any part. There is an appropriate amount of historical introduction to each chapter.
This material needs to be read, and remembered. There was a long time in our history when, although there was no more slavery, African Americans were treated as a separate serf class, under constant pressures and reminders of their lower status. Whites used pervasive legal and social downward pressures to keep African Americans out of an equal education, and equal access to public facilities, much less the right to equal jobs and the right to vote -- and then claimed that African Americans' lack of achievement was a racial fault. If an African American violated one of the many social taboos, the sanctions ranged from a beating, to loss of job, and even being lynched.
While whites benefited from Jim Crow, the whites, also, were trapped in the system. They were also forced to abide by legal segregation, and were subject to social pressure if they were too liberal (being called "n* lover," "white n*," etc.).
What led to the mindset that the end of slavery should lead to continued legal and social oppression of African Americans? It was part of white American culture. Lincoln himself said that he was not "in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.... [T]here must be the position of superior and inferior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes traded the end of southern post-war Reconstruction for the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency. Southern states then were free to institute the Jim Crow system.
I believe we are more subject to peer pressure than we would like to believe. Although reviewer McInerney asserts that "no civilized person" would benefit from Jim Crow, I feel many otherwise-good people were trapped and/or blinded by their own interests and surroundings. When allowed, and even encouraged, their evil side showed itself. On this topic, see John Griffin's _Black Like Me_, on the different faces that whites showed to other whites, and to African Americans.
While we are certain that we wouldn't go back to that system, we shouldn't be so sure that we, also, wouldn't be trapped by it if we were born into it. Consider that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy (to a large extent) didn't take effective action to end segregation.
This book is excellent. Those dreadful and shameful times -- and the vestiges which still continue -- must not be forgotten.

Reveals how blacks fought against the system.......2002-04-10

This slipcased book and 2-cd set supplements the written word with oral history, gathering the voices of men and women who were firsthand witnesses to segregation in the south. Stories by men and women from all walks of life reveal how blacks fought against the system, built communities, and ran businesses in a society which denied them basic rights. Remembering Jim Crow offers the reader a comprehensive, involving, highly recommended presentation.

Slavery The Sequel.......2002-03-14

Any illusions about the freedom and equality that were alleged to have been given to African Americans in this country following the Civil War were just that, illusions. The reality of America's version of Apartheid was legitimized in 1896 in the United States Supreme Court with the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson. When the de-facto segregation that Plessy allowed was added to the de jure laws that followed, whatever emancipation had been promised was firmly repudiated. It is even legitimate to go back to 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes and his party sold out, and swapped the presidency for the removal of federal troops from the south.

"Remembering Jim Crow", is a brilliant collection of first hand accounts of life under Jim Crow by those who were victimized by its laws. A large cast collected these verbal accounts over several years, and they accomplished no less than the preservation of a sinister part of this country's history. A time that W.E.B. Dubois characterized as, "living behind the veil". Combined with the book, "At The Hands Of Person's Unknown", which I commented extensively on, these two books, and if you choose the accompanying CD of the interviews, provides a wide, if horrific view of these eight decades.

These testimonies are also notable for the speakers who identify by name the people and families that victimized them. This is not ancient history that many would like to forget. These people who survived and speak of Jim Crow are alive, and so a presumption that their tormentors are alive is reasonable. The end of the book includes portions of a documentary that was made as part of this project with National Public Radio. Happily some of the whites that were interviewed in Iberia Perish in Louisiana remember and look with regret on what they did and did not do. Their willingness to speak on the record is admirable. But lest anyone think that all is solved there are also people who went on the record bemoaning their never having enjoyed the privileges that Jim Crow gave whites. A man named Barrow expressed himself thusly, "That was awful nice, you know, you'd go hunting, "Boy clean those ducks", you know, "Skin that dear", uh, "Shine my shoes". I believe I could have gone for that. Yeah I think you could have too".

Book Description

A compelling biography of a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, an eminent Chicago-trained sociologist, and a pioneering race relations leader.

Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941

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Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941
Jonathan Scott Holloway
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

African-American & Black | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

Discrimination & Racism | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0807853437
Release Date: 2001-12-03

Book Description

In this book, Jonathan Holloway explores the early lives and careers of economist Abram Harris Jr., sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and political scientist Ralph Bunche--three black scholars who taught at Howard University during the New Deal and, together, formed the leading edge of American social science radicalism.

Harris, Frazier, and Bunche represented the vanguard of the young black radical intellectual-activists who dared to criticize the NAACP for its cautious civil rights agenda and saw in the turmoil of the Great Depression an opportunity to advocate class-based solutions to what were commonly considered racial problems. Despite the broader approach they called for, both their advocates and their detractors had difficulty seeing them as anything but "black intellectuals" speaking on "black issues."

Customer Reviews:

"Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the new Afrocentrism." .......2006-01-20

"Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the new Afrocentrism."

Anthony Kwameh Appiah

Rev: Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities by Clinton Jean Times Literary Supplement February 12 1993 p. 24-25.

In the last few years there has been a stream of publications, especially in the United States, aimed at establishing a new basis for the study and teaching of African and African-American culture. Whether or not they actually use the word "Afrocentric" on their packaging, these books-which differ enormously in the quality of their thought and writing, as well as in their factual reliability-have a certain common set of preoccupations, whose persistence entitles one now to speak of a broadly Afrocentric paradigm.

The consensus about which these works are organized has two basic elements, one critical, and the other positive, which are either argued or taken for granted in them all. The negative thesis is that modern Western scholarship on cultural matters, high and low, is hopelessly Eurocentric. This means, to begin with, that Western scholarship understands European history, intellectual life and social institutions as a sort of ideal type, both normatively and descriptively. But Eurocentric work also displays an inability, rooted in prejudice, to enter sympathetically into the forms of life of non-Europeans, and, especially, of black people of African descent. As a consequence of this Eurocentrism, Western scholarship presupposes, so the story goes, that Africans have produced little of much cultural worth and that cultural works of sophistication or value (like the architecture of Great Zimbabwe or the Pyramids), even when they are in Africa, are unlikely to have been produced by black people.

In support of this Eurocentricity thesis some (and occasionally a great deal of) work goes into showing that European scholars at least since the Enlightenment have set about to conceal facts about the African origins of certain central elements of Western civilization: notably, both the Egyptian origins of the Greek "miracle" and the black African origins of the Egyptian "miracle."

This negative thesis is argued as the prolegomenon to an alternative, positive, "Afrocentric" view, in which African cultural creativity is discovered to have been at the origin of Western civilization, and Western civilization, especially in modernity, is either asserted or implied to be intrinsically morally depraved; incapable, in particular, of living peacefully with Others. We (sometimes all of us, sometimes just those of us who are black) are urged, then, to center on African history (and, particularly the history of the Egypt of the pharaohs) and return to African values.

The Afrocentric paradigm is not just the source of a lively body of writing: it is the basis, too, of a movement in the United States to revise the teaching of African-American children, to provide them with an Afrocentric education. Here the argument is that the Eurocentricity of what is taught in American schools, at best, fails to nurture, and, at worst, actively damages the self-esteem of black children, and that what these children need instead is a diet of celebratory African history (also beginning in Egypt and insisting that its civilization was black) and the transmission of African values.

These values are often taught now in the version developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga and associated with the invention of a feast called "Kwanzaa," designed to provide an African celebration to go with Christmas and Hanukkah. (American children are taught Swahili words, naming various allegedly African virtues, as their proper inheritance. There is something of an irony in the use of Swahili as an Afrocentric language, since hardly any of the slaves brought to the New World can have known the language, while it was in fact being used in a culture in which slave trading to the Arabian peninsula was a major element of the economy.) This particular brand of Afrocentrism goes under the label of "Kemetism" ("Kemet" being a name for ancient Egypt): and the whole package can be found in a recent work by Molefi Kete Asante, one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, entitled Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge.

At least as important as published work is a body of Afrocentric lore transmitted in public lectures and in discussion groups by figures who have tended in recent years to combine the Afrocentric paradigm with a peculiar anti-Semitism, which seems preoccupied with placing especial responsibility for the ills of the black world on a Jewish conspiracy. Many of the leading rap stars seem to subscribe to this package of views, combining it with their well-known misogyny and homophobia, to produce a cultural brew as noxious as any currently available in popular culture. The diagnosis of this particular cultural pathology is the subject of much current speculation among observers of the African-American cultural scene.

The Afrocentric paradigm-the scholarly end of the movement-has one major hero: Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese man-of-letters, after whom the university in Dakar, Senegal is now named. Diop argued over many years (beginning in the 1950s) for the thesis of the African origins of Greek civilization. In such works as L'unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire, Anteriorité des civilisations nègres, Nations nègres et culture, Fondements économiques et culturels d'un état federal d'Afrique noir and Parenté génétique de l'egyptien pharaonique et des langues negro-Africaines, he pursued a complex agenda, in which the splendors of Egypt were a basis for contemporary African pride and the cultural unity derived from a common African source could be the basis for modern African political unity.

Like most cultural movements at full flood, this Afrocentric turn is a composite of truth and error, insight and illusion, moral generosity and meanness. But if there is one thing that strikes me more about it than any other it is how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought. (One of the symptomatic features of much Afrocentric writing is that the antagonists it identifies are largely dead.) Afrocentrism, in short, seems very much to share the presuppositions of the Victorian ideologies against which it is reacting.

Take, for example, the preoccupation with the ancient world. The academic curriculum of the nineteenth century traced Western civilization to roots in ancient Greece, following a history of progress from the excellent beginnings mapped out by the heirs of Homer. Our Afrocentrists have bought into this way of doing cultural history, and have only challenged the priority of the (white) Greeks replacing it with the priority of the (black) Egyptians. There are, of course, genuine issues for discussion here about the relations between different parts of the ancient Mediterranean and the Greek "miracle." Martin Bernal (not, by my accounts an Afrocentrist, because he doesn't support the positive agenda of the movement) is a hero for Afrocentrists because he has taken on, in Black Athena, the challenge of refuting the modern view that the Greeks owed nothing of importance to Egypt. So far as I can see, there seems to be a consensus, now, that Bernal convincingly demonstrates the role of prejudice against blacks and Jews in classical scholarship in the Enlightenment and since, while not establishing decisively his own positive account of ancient history.

But it is not this perfectly interesting and potentially genteel academic debate that has drawn Bernal to the Afrocentrists' attention. For their purposes it is essential not only to agree with Bernal's account of ancient intellectual history but also to insist, in Diop's words, that "Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization [and]... the moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world..." And on this matter Bernal has little to say. Fortunately he did not have to argue for this secondary thesis, since it is taken to be implicit in his title. African Athena or Egyptian Athena would have left the racial issue open: Black Athena does not.

It is this preoccupation with racial matters that is so much a response to the nineteenth-century framing of the issues. What was added in the nineteenth century to the classicism of the Enlightenment was the thought that the Western heritage was a racial possession. This story neglects not only Egyptian influences on the Greeks but such minor embarrassments as the centrality of Jewish contributions to Western high culture, and the key role of the Arabs in maintaining the intellectual tradition that linked Plato to the Renaissance. And it depends on a way of thinking of culture and biology which is bound to be discomfited by those scholars, black, brown and yellow, who have taken possession of Western culture in the twentieth century and mastered it, at the very same time as many of the supposed racial heirs of the West have been immersed in a popular culture "contaminated" with African rhythms.

But in our day racialism surely does not need arguing against in serious company. Do we not all know that there is biology and there is culture; that their interconnections and interdependencies are complex and multiply mediated; that the old simplicities of racialism have not stood the test of exposure to the evidence? Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. After all, the Afrocentrist interest in the color of the ancient Egyptians presumably derives from the thought that if they were black then they were of the same race as contemporary black Africans and their New World cousins. (It is, indeed, a standard feature of Afrocentric argument to go through a series of claims about the physical anthropological evidence for the priority in various domains of the African.) And why, if you do not conflate biology and culture, should that matter?

It is hard to find in the Afrocentrist literature a clearer answer to this question than the passage from Diop I quoted earlier. Racial identity with the Egyptians makes their achievements one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks. (Of course, if Greece grew out of Egypt and "the West" grew out of Greece, then the West is one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks: and its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities. But I digress.) Perhaps this is why Black Athena and African Origins of Civilization-which contains translated selections from Diop's Anteriorité des civilisations nègres-sell so well on the streets of Harlem. And if it is, this is a reason that would have been entirely congenial to the nineteenth century Eurocentrists whom Afrocentricity aims to refute.

Once we see the essentially reactive structure of Afrocentrism-it is, to borrow Marx's account of his relation to Hegel, simply Eurocentrism turned upside down-we can understand where its intellectual weaknesses will lie. It is not surprising, for example, that in choosing to talk about Egypt and ignore the rest of Africa and African history, Afrocentrism shares the European prejudice against cultures without writing. Eurocentrism, finding a literate culture and significant architecture, set about claiming that Egypt could not be black. Afrocentrism chooses Egypt because Eurocentrism had already made a claim on it.

Similarly, we shall not be surprised at what is one of the most tiresome features of Afrocentrism, namely its persistence in what the Beninois philosopher (and current Minister of Culture) Paulin Hountondji has called "unanimism": the view that there is an African culture to which to appeal. It is surely prima facie preposterous to suppose that there is an African culture, shared by everyone from the civilizations of the upper Nile thousands of years ago to the thousand or so language-zones of contemporary Africa?

Here too, in aiming to identify some common core of African civilization, the Afrocentrists seem to be responding to earlier attempts to identify a common core of Western culture. Wandering, as I have, from Venice to Venice Beach, California, or from York to New York, one can be forgiven for wondering how unitary the West really is today. But it was always a strange idea that Alexander and Alfred and Frederick the Greats had something deeply in common with each other and with the least of their subjects that could be called Western culture. And in Africa, where whatever continuity there has been through all this time, has not been mediated by even the sort of broken textual tradition that in some sense unites something called Western culture, it is not only a strange idea but a silly one.

A final irony is worth pointing out: Afrocentrism, which is offered in the name of black solidarity, has, by and large, entirely ignored the work of African scholars other than Diop. (This fact tends to be concealed because African-American scholars like Asante and Karenga have adopted African names.) Thus, much play has been given to another major source book for the Afrocentric, Jahnheinz Jahn's Muntu-African cultures and the Western World, a work that first appeared in the United States with great éclat in the early nineteen sixties. The book revolves around the concept of NTU. (This is the stem of the Kinyaruanda-Bantu words "Muntu" (Person), "Kintu" (thing), "Hantu" (place and time) and "Kuntu" (modality) and it is a morpheme that does not occur unprefixed in Kinyaruanda.) "NTU" Jahn wrote with the gravitas of revelation, "is the universal force as such."

Reading this I found myself irresistibly drawn into a fantasy in which an African scholar returns to her home in Lagos or Nairobi, with the important news that she has uncovered the key to Western culture. Soon to be published, THING: Western Culture and the African World, a work that exposes the philosophy of ING, written so clearly on the face of the English language. For ING, in the Euro-American view, is the inner dynamic essence of the world. In the very structure of the terms doing and making and meaning, the English (and thus, by extension all Westerners) express their deep commitment to this conception: but the secret heart of the matter is captured in their primary ontological category of th-ing; every th-ing-or be-ing as their sages express the matter in the more specialized vocabulary of one of their secret societies-is not stable but ceaselessly changing. Here we see the fundamental explanation for the extraordinary neophilia of Western culture, its sense that reality is change.

The notion that there is something unitary called African culture that could be summarized in this sort of way has been subjected to devastating critique by a generation of African intellectuals. But little sign of African accounts of African culture appears in the writings of Afrocentricity. Molefi Asante has written whole books with Akan culture at the heart of them without referring to the major works of Akan philosophers such as J. B. Danquah, William Abrahams, Kwasi Wiredu, and Kwame Gyekye. And I am reliably informed that on one occasion not so long ago an African-American interlocutor told a distinguished Zairian intellectual "we do not need you educated Africans coming here to tell us about African culture."

It is against this background that we should read Clinton Jean's Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities, which is certainly among the best-written and -argued Afrocentric books I have read. Professor Jean begins with a two-part defense of the negative thesis. The first chapter shows by a careful reading of sociological writing and, especially, of Weber, that mainstream sociology is Eurocentric; the second demonstrates the same for radical theory, and especially for Marx and Marxism. (In the first chapter Professor Jean takes up a fascinating Weberian discussion of bureaucracy, that has a great deal of interest in its own right.)

These chapters strike me as controversial only in the detail. In their broad outlines, many contemporary scholars of all colors would surely accept them. The fact that this is so makes one wonder whether Professor Jean is right to think that "below the surface" of American liberal thought, "run the powerful currents of their ethnocentric hatreds of other cultures and peoples of color that bear them-none so virulent as the hatred of blacks and their history." Eurocentrism is surely seen, nowadays, as something to be rooted out: and ethnocentrism is busier in America's streets than in its universities.

Professor Jean's third chapter, whose somewhat polemical title is "For those who think that Black Studies can be too nationalistic," takes up some of Diop's ideas (especially from Unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire) to defend a view of African culture as centrally more humane than Western culture. Like too many Afrocentrists, Jean doesn't seem very interested in what African's other than Diop have had to say about the matter. But unlike many of them, he seems to be inviting everyone, not only those of us who are black, to draw on Africa's resources of humanism.

This, then, is a benevolent and generous Afrocentrism, and I wish I could agree with more of its substantial claims. But the fact is that unanimism seems to me both theoretically unlikely and quite incompatible with the evidence. And so, as I have already said, I reject the very idea that there is an African anything on which to draw. Professor Jean tells me nothing that quiets these doubts. And while any sane person must agree that some horrendous crimes, crimes almost incommensurable with the crimes of past civilizations, have been committed in our century in the West, it hardly seems right that African cultures have some intrinsic humanism: true, Africa did not develop the murder industry of the Holocaust, but cruelty and unkindness are not Western prerogatives, any more than are intelligence and creativity. (Even if something called "African culture" had all the features Professor Jean claimed for it, you'd need more than a few quotes from Diop and Basil Davidson and a passage from Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard to prove it.)

Is not the proper response to Eurocentrism not a reactive Afrocentrism, but a new understanding that humanizes all of us by learning to think beyond race?

Black hat, blue veil, starry sky: Selected poetry, 1967-1992

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Black hat, blue veil, starry sky: Selected poetry, 1967-1992
Susan L Grimshaw
Manufacturer: Mitsou Rides the Metro Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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