Notice how with Gilroy, you didn't see any Black people with praise for the books. Surely there had to be one other person who thought he made sense, unless, of course, he doesn't.
Hmm...See blurbs by Stuart Hall on the back cover of Black Atlantic. Below see more from Black academics and journals edited by Blacks like Race & Class. So the Editors of Transition where I saw the excerpt from Gilroy on Garvey and Mussolini are Inauthentic Blacks? http://web-dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition/edinfo.htm Chairman of the Editorial Board Wole Soyinka Editors Kwame Anthony Appiah Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Executive Editor Michael C. Vazquez Deputy Editor Kelefa Sanneh Managing Editor Trevor Corson Editorial Board Houston A Baker, Jr. Dennis Brutus Aimé Césaire Maryse Condé Francis Deng Manthia Diawara Sara Suleri Goodyear Carlos Fuentes Stuart Hall bell hooks Paulin Hountondji Abiola Irele Biodun Jeyifo Jamaica Kincaid Manning Marable Toni Morrison V. Y. Mudimbe Arnold Rampersad Derek Walcott Cornel West William Julius Wilson Just some of the contributors who have appeared in Transition’s pages recently: Kathleen Cleaver, Ice Cube, Carlos Fuentes, Nadine Gordimer, Philip Gourevitch, Christopher Hitchens, bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid, KRS-One, Spike Lee, Richard Rorty, Edward Said…
TRANSITION 73: The White Issue
TRANSITION's long-awaited study of white people and "whiteness" -- by writers of color. Our best-selling issue.
bell hooks on Leni Riefenstahl and white feminism
http://www.lol.shareworld.com/zmag/articles/april96hooks.htm ("Thinking About Capitalism: A conversation with cultural critic Paul Gilroy")
Ann duCille on Shirley Temple, race, and popular culture
Jamaica Kincaid on Thomas Jefferson and the myth of America
Joe Wood on Japan, hip-hop, and the minstrel tradition
More Inauthentic Blacks! http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/GILBLA_R.html "A thoughtful evaluation of Western black identity, and a scathing critique of the nationalist, 'ethical absolutist' position that posits that such identities are mutually exclusive...There is much to recommend about [it]: many thought-provoking questions and compelling arguments."
--Carrie B. Robinson, Quarterly Black Review of Books
This is a splendid book...Gilroy's main contribution to scholarship is that by inserting black people as central participants in the creation of the modern world he thereby rewrites the history of modernity and modernism."
--Hazel Carby, Yale University http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CARRAC.html (Who are the "race men" standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society--and how they exclude women altogether.
Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement--a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity.
In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men--still leaving women out of the picture.
A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.
Hazel V. Carby is Chair of African and African American Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. and Cultures in Babylon.)
This book's many virtues of style combine with elegant local readings of Douglass, Wright, Du Bois, Morrison; of Adorno and Baumann; and a whole range of popular culture from jazz to Hip Hop...It is a mark of the ambition and the achievement of this book that so many readers will find it rewarding."
--Anthony Appiah, Harvard University
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:h4yRIsJJFCI:www.tiac.net/users/thaslett /gilroy/gilroy_biblio.html+Gilroy+Hall+&hl=en 1981 'You Can't Fool The Youth:Race and Class Formation in the 80s' Race and Class (Autumn/Winter)
1980 'Managing The Underclass - A note on the Sociology of race in Britain' Race and Class (Summer). http://www.sagepub.co.uk/frame.html?http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/detail s/j0320.html A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation
1994 'Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity and the challenge of a changing same' in (eds.) Sidney Lemelle & Robin Kelley Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (Verso). http://www.monthlyreview.org/race.htm 1992 'Diaspora Cultures' in (eds.) Stuart Hall (et al) Modernity And Its Cultures (Polity Press).
1982 'The Myth of Black Criminality' in (eds.) M. Eve and D. Musson The Socialist Register Merlin. This essay has been re-printed in updated form in (ed.) P. Scraton: Law, Order And The Authoritarian State Open University Press, 1987
1986 (with Reena Bhavnani, Juliet Coke, Stuart Hall, Herman Ouseley and Keith Vaz) A Different Reality - An Account of Black People's experiences and their grievances before and after the Handsworth Rebellion of September 1985 (West Midlands County Council).
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Gilroy.htm Major Issues
Although the specifics of Gilroy's arguments are too far reaching to summarize with any accuracy, three important arguments and motifs require some attention:
1) The sailing ship. Gilroy offers the image of the sailing ship as a "chronotope" (following Bakhtin, see bibliography, below) that suggests several aspects of the black atlantic. On the one hand, it captures the specifics of the travelling locality within and outside national boundaries. On the other it evokes the middle passage of the slave trade that is necessary to understanding the experience of transnational black modernity:
I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship-- a living, microcultural, micro-political system in motion-- is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons.... Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs. (4)
2) Slavery. Crucial to Gilroy's argument, slavery in the West is first and foremost a shared experience of "terror" that lies at the heart of black diasporic communities all across the Atlantic. It is in some sense the root cause of transnational black identity. Supplementing that connection, however, Gilroy takes pains to point out that the slave trade was the first instance of transnational trade that allowed Western modernity to achieve its economic and cultural hegemony. In much the same vein as Edward Said, who points out that the systematic aesthetic representations of the East were inextricably bound up with the material exploitations of the European colonial enterprise, Gilroy links abstract philosophical modernity to the very real, very brutal practice of African enslavement. In turn, he shows how black intellectuals since (about) 1850 have taken up memories of slavery as a way into profound critiques of modernity in general.
Gilroy begins with Frederick Douglass and reads an incident from Douglass' life that he told in three separate texts as an alternative to Hegel's well known master-slave dialectic. In Gilroy's reading of Douglass, "[it] is the slave rather than the master who emerges from Douglass's account possessed of 'consciousness that exists for itself,' while the master becomes representative of a 'consciousness that is repressed within itself'" (60). More than simply inverting the dialectic for the sake of argument, however, the reworking of Hegel's narrative into one of emancipation initiates a Black aesthetic that puts the shared experience of enslavement and emancipation at the heart of a socially motivated literary tradition.
As its most recent incarnation (or at least one of the current strands in the "web of diaspora identities" that comprise the black atlantic-- 218), Gilroy foregrounds Toni Morrison's Beloved-- along with Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident-- as literary participants in an otherwise philosophical discussion. While other chapters examine, for example, the way that Richard Wright in his later years in Paris took up Nietzche, Marx and Freud to arrive at ambivalence about modernity, the final chapter examines how a number of artists from James Brown and a "little-known songwriter" named Percy Mayfield to contemporary authors have develop a "slave sublime" that attempts to represent the "unsayable" experience of slavery. Not simply an attempt to recover a social past governed by terror and atrocity, Gilroy figures these artists as asserting not only the impossibility of accurately recovering such a history, but also as rebutting the modern belief in Reason against the irrationality of Africans and the diaspora:
In particular, [the desire to pit Euro-American modernity against "bestial" slaves] is formed by the need to indict those forms of rationality which have been rendered implausible by their racially exclusive character and further to explore the history of their complicity with terror systematically and rationally practiced as a form of political and economic administration.... It is being suggetsed that the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marks out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later. (220-221)
3) Music. Although five of the six chapters in the Black Atlantic center on prominent intellectuals, one-- chapter 3, "'Jewels Brought from Bondage': Black Music and the Politics of Authenicity"-- focuses on music and performance as a particularly salient public arena in which artists have literally performed debates about modernity. For Gilroy, music is important not only because of its popular status, but also because it unseats language and textuality as "preeminent expressions of human consciousness" (74). That alternative becomes even more important in the wake of slavery and the attempt to express the unsayable. Broadest of all the chapters in historical scope, it covers territroy from the Fisk University Singers' 1871 trip to England through discussions about authenticity in Jazz and Jimi Hendrix and up to the present as he looks at Reggae, Bhangra and Hip-Hop. Gilroy does not simplify music into a matter of influence from prominent centers to new arenas, but rather shows how ideas and styles have travelled, interacted, and become a transnational debate about authentic identity.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v001/1.1r_chaloupka.html
http://www.monthlyreview.org/201reed.htm http://www.monthlyreview.org/race.htm "I welcome this new edition of Oliver Cromwell Cox's brilliant work. Published amid Cold War repression and postwar racist violence, and kept in print by Monthly Review Press ever since, it is as fresh and urgent as ever. It stands not only as one of the most incisive materialist analyses of race and racism but as a true classic in the sociology of race."— ROBIN D.G. KELLEY, New York University
http://www.newschool.edu/gf/polsci/faculty/reed/ Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and our Retreat from Racial Equality, editor; Westview Press, 1999.
W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line; Oxford University Press, 1997. (Winner, National Conference of Black Political Scientists' 1998 Outstanding Book Award).
Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, editor; Greenwood Press. (Nominated for APSA's Ralph J. Bunche Award)
http://www.newschool.edu/gf/polsci/faculty/reed/cv.htm "Prophesy Deliverance!: Review Essay," Telos (Summer 1984).
"Narcissistic Politics in Atlanta," Telos (Summer 1981).
"Symposium on Intellectuals: Comment," Telos (Winter 1981/82).
"Declining Significance of Race?: A Review Essay," Telos (Summer 1980).
"Black Particularity Reconsidered," Telos (Spring 1979) .
"Toward the Final Solution: A Review Essay," Telos (Fall 1979).
"Crocodile Tears & Auto-critique of the Bourgeoisie: 'Rollerball' & Rebellion in Mass Culture," Endarch 1 (Winter 1976).
"Scientistic Socialism: Notes on the New, Afro-American Magic Marxism," Endarch; 1 (Fall 1974).
"Pan-Africanism: Ideology for Liberation?" The Black Scholar (September 1971), reprinted in Hare & Chrisman, eds., Pan-Africanism; Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.
"Marxism and Nationalism in Afroamerica," Social Theory and Practice; 1 (Fall 1971).
Organized and chaired panel on "The Collapse of Liberalism and Marxism and the Implications for Afro-American Social Theory," at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1982.