Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ESSAY...
...ESSAY: The Politics of Inclusion...
...pieces that focus more closely on Malcolm X himself are equally revealing. Cornel West's essay on "Malcolm X and Black Rage" deals with the transformative, freeing anger so central to Malcolm's thought and his electrifying oratory style. For West, Malcolm articulated outrage at "the sheer absurdity that confronts human beings of African descent in this country--the incessant assaults on Black intelligence, beauty, character and possibility." With his trademark eloquence, West elucidates how that rage served to perform a "Black psychic conversion," a defiant re-evaluation of the self that is free of American racist values. West argues...
...pages away, historian Adolph Reed, Jr. criticizes the same artists for "spew[ing] garbled compounds of half-truth, distortion, Afrocentric drivel, and crackerbarrel wisdom." Amiri Baraka, in his uneven but driving essay, inveighs against Spike Lee's forthcoming film, calling it part of the "black bourgeoisie's attack on Malcolm X." Marlon Riggs later labels Baraka's approach mere "rhetoric...
...Hilton Als, in perhaps the most disturbing and challenging essay included here, contests the very existence of any book (such as this one) which defines writers by color. He contemptuously dismisses the notions of "otherness" and "difference" that govern so much thought today, calling them "very stupid words." His defiant piece suggests an exciting alternative to deeply rooted ideas about race difference and so-called "minority" issues. The inclusion of Als' essay places this collection on the cutting edge of current Black criticism...