African-American Literary Studies and the Legacies of Black Nationalism

Abstract

Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, Houston Baker, Jr. Columbia University Press, 2008. Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, Robert Reid-Pharr. New York University Press, 2007. During the heyday of the Black Power movement, critic Larry Neal imagined the blues singer as “the voice of the community, its historian, and one of the shapers of its morality” (38). The performer's “ideas and values are, in fact, merely expressions of the general psychology of the people” (38). Neal understood this vocalist as both repository and expressive medium in the consolidation of a nationalist consciousness that would liberate African Americans from white “ideas and values that finally attack the core” of black “existence” (38). In this regard Neal and his fellow nationalists marshaled vernacular culture as armament in combating the hegemony of a white America. So potent was the era's...