| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. By Jerry Gershenhorn. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. xx, 338 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-8032-2187-8.)

Jerry Gershenhorn has performed an enormous service in writing the first scholarly biography of a figure who, forty years after his death and over sixty years after the publication of his most famous book, remains the subject of seemingly unresolvable controversies. Melville J. Herskovits was an intellectual contributor to and institutional actor in the emergence of black and African studies in mainstream American universities, as well as a political critic of post-independence Africa policy, more or less continuously from the mid-1920s until his death in 1963. He engaged in all arenas, on all kinds of issues, with a wide variety of colleagues and adversaries, with respect to both the larger world of national social and political history and the smaller world of foundation funding and institutional politics. This makes for an extraordinarily complex story, with raw personal and collective sensitivities at many points. Until now, no one seems to have wanted to take on such a history in any detail, a history that traces out the profound geological fault constituted by race and different forms of racism in American life and liberal thought.

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