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Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties New Edition
Author(s): James C. Hall (Author)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication Date: 19 Oct. 2001
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 0195096096
- ISBN-13: 9780195096095
Book Description
Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book argues that American artistry in the 1960s can be understood as one of the most vital and compelling interrogations of modernity. James C. Hall finds that the legacy of slavery and the resistance to it have by necessity made African Americans among the most incisive critics and celebrants of the Enlightenment inheritance. Focusing on the work of six individuals--Robert Hayden, William Demby, Paule Marshall, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W.E.B. DuBois--Mercy, Mercy Me seeks to recover an American tradition of evaluating the "dialectic of the Enlightenment."
Editorial Reviews
Review
The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement are celebrated as critical moments of racial nationalism and cultural awakening. Questioning the critical consensus about this narrative, however, James Hall reframe[s] these two literary periods in light of transnational and anti-modernist paradigms ... provocative [study] disturbing to our common sense about these seminal eras. ― American Literature
Hall deftly restores a fuller voice to sixties artists too often straightjacketed within an obligatory hermeneutics of racial protest. ―
American LiteratureJames C. Hall invites us to revise our thinking about the 1960s in this thoughtful and generative study of the extraordinary efflorescence of poetry, fiction, autobiography, music, and painting that emerged out of that decade's African American freedom movement ... thoughtful, subtle, and persuasive. ―
The Journal of American HistoryAbout the Author
James C. Hall is Associate Professor of African-American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
