Wishlist
Share It
Tweet It
EARN 4 SUPER POINTS!
What's this?
| Format: | Paperback |
Click here for Kobo Edition (eBook). Available for $9.99! (What's this?)
Condition:
Used-Good
In Stock
Usually Ships in 1-2 business days:
7 New and Used
from
$4.00
Product Summary
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
ISBN-10: 0679763783
ISBN-13: 9780679763789
Buy.com Sku: 30119033
Publish Date: 4/10/2007
Dimensions:
(in Inches) 8H x 5.75L x 0.75T
Pages:
196
See more in Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
| Almost one-hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the notion of the "talented tenth," an African American elite that would serve as leaders and models for the larger black community. In this unprecedented collaboration, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West--two of Du Bois's most prominent intellectual descendants--reassess that relationship and its implications for the future of black Americans. If the 1990s are the best of times for the heirs of the Talented Tenth, they are unquestionably worse for the growing black underclass. As they examine the origins of this widening gulf and propose solutions for it, Gates and West combine memoir and biography, social analysis and cultural survey into a book that is incisive and compassionate, cautionary and deeply stirring.
"Brilliant...a social, cultural and political blueprint...that attempts to illumine the future path for blacks and American democracy."--New York Daily News "Henry Louis Gates., Jr., and Cornel West are among the most renowned American intellectuals of our time."--New York Times Book Review |
|
From the Publisher:
Two distinguished African-American scholars draw on the ideas of W. E. B. DuBois to assess the hopes, fears, and dreams of the African-American community at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. |
Author Bio
Cornel West
Cornel West received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Yale Divinity School, Harvard, and Princeton University as a professor of religion and African-American Studies. A Marxist and theologian, West defined many of his concerns in a book he co-authored with bell hooks called BREAKING BREAD, in which the two discuss issues of race, gender, and education. His breakthrough book, RACE MATTERS, became a best seller, and he collaborated with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on THE FUTURE OF THE RACE, which reflected West's greatest influence, W.E.B. DuBois. In 2002, West--by then a well-known public intellectual--was teaching at Harvard University, where he became embroiled in a well-publicized controversy with its president, Lawrence Summers, about West's outside work, teaching loads, and grading standards, as well as his participation in the making of a music CD entitled SKETCHES OF MY CULTURE that West called "rhythm and blues, but with a hip-hop dimension." West subsequently left Harvard and returned to Princeton.In his memoir COLORED PEOPLE, Henry Louis Gates describes the place where he grew up: Piedmont, West Virginia. It was a middle-class African American community, where people took an interest in each other and where the little details of everyday life passed into local history. Gates studied at Harvard University, and became one of the country's foremost scholars of African American history and literature. He first made his name at Cornell and later at Yale, editing collections of slave narratives, and writing THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY. He was asked by Harvard to establish a world-class Black Studies department, to which he recruited leading scholars. A prodigious scholar himself, Gates assembled THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE, and created an entirely new online reference work, an encyclopedia of Africana based on the ideas first proposed by W.E.B. Dubois. He also edited lesser-known works by obscure writers, including Hannah Craft's THE BONDWOMAN'S NARRATIVE, which he believes is the first novel by a female slave. Gates is known to the general public as the host of several popular PBS series, including a series in which he traveled to Africa, one on genealogy called AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES, and, in 2007, FINDING OPRAH'S ROOTS, about the ancestry of TV personality Oprah Winfrey. In his personal life, Gates is a collector of memorabilia relating to the African American experience. In 2008, Henry Louis Gates was named editor-in-chief of The Root, an online magazine of the Washington Post Company.
