The Black Box
Writing the Race
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The Black Box
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Narrated by:
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Dominic Hoffman
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Written by:
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
About this listen
— Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste
“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.”
—The New York Times
A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.
Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory 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 livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.
It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." 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" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.©2024 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (P)2024 Penguin Audio
What the critics say
“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 Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“These reflections are elegant entrees into the debates that Black Americans have conducted in their long quest for self-definition. The Black Box succeeds not because it contains novel facts but because Gates’s gloss on the established history glimmers. He proposes that it is by narrating and naming—that is, by writing—that Black Americans have shattered the narrow boxes in which they have so often been imprisoned. By writing about this writing, he, too, pens his way free.”—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post