Lure And Loathing: Twenty black intellectuals address W.E.B. Du Bois's dilemma of the double-consciousness of African Americans

by Gerald Early (Introduction)

Eighteen essays written by prominent African-American intellectuals--including Nikki Giovanni, James McPherson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.--talk about what it means to be African American in the 1990s. Reprint.

Genres: Race

384 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1993

Reviews

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two short passages from Lure And Loathing:


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“On the populist left, the then favored model of the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual”: someone who participated in and was part of the community he would uplift. And yet James Baldwin’s basic conception of himself was formed by the familiar, and still well-entrenched, idea of the alienated artist or intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension between these two models – he would do so in his fiction – be he was never to resolve it.”
– Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Welcome Table


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“The sister in Washington, D.C., who said, when asked her reaction to the Queen of England’s visit, ‘Well, she’s fascinating. But so am I.’”
– Kristin Hunter Lattany, Off-Timing: Stepping to the Different Drummer


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[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am using the essay "Black Is the Noun" by Nikki Giovanni to kick off an initial discussion of the significance of naming in my upcoming Black Kansas Artists course.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of essays that gave me a lot to think about and a lot of nuance for teaching Du Bois and black culture in general.