Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. By Ross Posnock. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xii, 353 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-674-14309-4.)

In 1905 the sociologist Max Weber wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, requesting that his Souls of Black Folk (1903) be translated into German. Du Bois enjoyed an international reputation as an empirical social scientist as well as cultural critic. The book under review, Ross Posnock's Color & Culture, deploys a novel analysis of Du Bois and launches an argument that African American writers were the first true intellectuals in the United States. Posnock's study can be recommended for its stimulating assertions and clear prose, but the author's specialization in literature must be disclosed from the outset. Half of the book discusses Du Bois's novel Dark Princess (1928) and arts criticism. The Du Bois that had attracted the attention of Weber, that is, the preeminent academic scholar of race and society, receives comparatively scant analysis. 1

On the other hand, it is true that the racism that restricted African American access to education forced black writers and black novelists to assume larger burdens of historical critique than were assumed by professional white academic scholars. Think of Ralph Ellison's political essays and Toni Morrison's Harvard University "American Civilization" lectures. . . .

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