Cover art for The Black Box
Published
Penguin, June 2025
ISBN
9781802064636
Format
Softcover, 304 pages
Dimensions
19.8cm × 13cm × 1.8cm

The Black Box Writing the Race

Not yet released
Due June 17, 2025.
Fast $7.95 flat-rate shipping!
Only pay $7.95 per order within Australia, including end-to-end parcel tracking.
100% encrypted and secure
We adhere to industry best practice and never store credit card details.
Talk to real people
Contact us seven days a week – our staff are here to help.

A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans use the written word to define themselves, by one of America's major literary critics

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box- Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world - a \"home\" - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be 'Black', and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand, to call into being a more just and equitable future.

This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of - and resisted confinement in - the black box that this \"nation within a nation\" has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

Related books