The Black Box
Writing the Race
Published on 20. March 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-80206-463-6 (ISBN)
Description
A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves over the course of the country's history.
Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition 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 Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world - a "home" - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.
This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be 'Black', and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand, to call into being a more just and equitable future.
This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of - and resisted confinement in - the black box that this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition 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 Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world - a "home" - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.
This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be 'Black', and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand, to call into being a more just and equitable future.
This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of - and resisted confinement in - the black box that this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
Reviews / Votes
The allure of this book, and the reason for its existence, are the narrative links he draws among these people and events, and his insistence that a survey of African American history is incomplete without a special consideration of how writing has undergirded and powered it. 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 -- Tope Folarin * The New York Times * 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 * Isabel Wilkinson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents * An absolute tour de force... A study in the art, intellect, and inherent contradictions that define the making of a people * Elle * Gates tracks questions of class, language, aesthetics, and resistance in a manyfaceted, clarifying, era-by-era chronicle propelled by vivid considerations of such influential Black writers as Phillis Wheatley, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison . . . A call to protect the free exchange of ideas in the classroom and beyond * Booklist (starred review) * A must for scholars, yet still accessible to general audiences, by arguably the preeminent scholar of African American studies. This gem brilliantly reflects multiple depictions of what it means to be a Black American amid complex, structured interracial and color-based discrimination discourses, in which writing and language are keys * Library Journal (starred review) *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 126 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
226 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80206-463-6 (9781802064636)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2024
Penguin Books Ltd
€9.49
Available for download
Person
Henry Louis Gates Jr is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored more than twenty books and created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. His most recent PBS documentary is Gospel.