Color & culture
Subtitle: Black writers and the making of the modern intellectual
By: Ross Posnock.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 353
Subjects: Du Bois, W. E. B. 1868-1963.; Locke, Alain LeRoy, 1886-1954.; American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism.; Language and culture -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; African Americans -- Intellectual life.; African Americans in literature.; Blacks -- Intellectual life.; United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Other titles: Color and culture
Description: "In this book, Ross Posnock shows that black writers, far from being recent arrivals, were arguably the first modern American intellectuals." "W. E. B. Du Bois's ideal of a "higher and broader and more varied human culture" is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Posnock identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed historical perspective on "black intellectuals" as a social category, ranging over a century - from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is "white culture" and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-346) and index.