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Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties
Author(s): James C. Hall (Author)
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication Date: October 19, 2001
- Edition: 1st
- 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
“Hall’s Mercy, Mercy Me is an important historical revision of the ‘monolithic construction’ of the sixties, particularly the Black Arts movement, solely in terms of a racial and cultural nationalism. …Hall deftly restores a fuller voice to sixties artists too often straightjacketed within an obligatory hermeneutics of racial protest.”–American Literature
About the Author
James C. Hall is Associate Professor of African-American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
