An Interview with Lawrence W. Levine by Ann Lage

On Black Culture and Black Consciousness and the Use of Theory	1
Ann Lage: The date is July 6, 2005, and I believe this is our ninth session with Larry Levine.	2
Lawrence W. Levine: One of the chief criticisms leveled at Black Culture and Black Consciousness, and other studies of that genre in the seventies and throughout the eighties as well, was that they were limiting and fragmenting.1	3
Even someone like John Higham, who had complained about homogenizing American history—he meant about class. We forgot all the fights and we homogenized our past. It was a good term. He argued this in '59. By the late seventies he gave a talk in which he said, "Larry Levine is one of the best, but even he fragments the American past. How can we understand the American past if we keep looking at it as a congeries of groups, rather than as a nation?" And that still is a criticism.	4
I just wanted to say that in fact I think the opposite is true, that is, the more we study these individual groups, the more we understand the process by which, for instance, they come into the culture, they acculturate, they disseminate their own culture, they fit in with the larger culture, the more we begin to understand America, and it isn't fragmenting at all. It's necessary to understand how groups fit together in this culture.	5
A good example is the part of Black Culture and Black Consciousness ... where I was looking for moments of acculturation after the Civil War, when blacks were now free to move around. When they had mobility, they were free to absorb other cultures in a way they couldn't as slaves, etc., and I thought that in the blues, which rises in the decades after slavery, I had found a chief medium of acculturation. Here's a good sign of acculturation. They're now singing in the solo voice. The "me" is important here. "Look at me. I am broke, I am lonely. I'm important." It's the post-Enlightenment consciousness, which blacks really didn't have in slavery.	6
But I also found that at the same moment, the music to the blues was revitalizing. It wasn't acculturating. It was moving back toward the group practice, back toward what they brought with them from Africa, revised of course, but nevertheless. And it had such a profound influence on American culture, in turn.	7
Lawrence W. Levine in a photograph from the mid-1990s. Photograph by Bruce Jackson.
So that by looking carefully at the group, one can begin to understand its influence in American history, the ways in which American history influenced it, and the process by which groups tend to acculturate, not by giving up everything they have, but by amalgamating what they have.	. . .