3 Posnock's book enters current debates in African American intellectual discourse. He favors Alain Locke's philosophy of race contact, which prefigured Anthony Appiah's deconstruction essays. In the end, Posnock's purpose is to examine and reject postmodernism, particularly for its obsession with identity. Without the foundation of the postmodernist cultural studies of Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, and bell hooks, as well as the essays of Barbara Fields, Posnock's pragmatism would not convince anybody. 5 Biographers and social historians of ideas will find Posnock's writings to be too idiosyncratic.
Strained interpretations result in misrepresentation.
Zora Neale Hurston was probably the most significant black woman intellectual before World War II, but Posnock attributes to Hurston a Boasian-inspired eclecticism and compares her to Jean Toomer. Yet Hurston was a recorder of the folk, critical of the cosmopolitan. The irreducible reality is that he succumbed to tuberculosis and loneliness and died of poverty in Bellevue Hospital. 7 Kevin Mumford Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.