Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book argues that American artistry in the 1960s can be understood as one of the most vital and compelling interrogations of modernity. James C. Hall finds that the legacy of slavery and the resistance to it have by necessity made African Americans among the most incisive critics and celebrants of the Enlightenment inheritance. Focusing on the work of six individuals--Robert Hayden, William Demby, Paule Marshall, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W.E.B. DuBois--Mercy, Mercy Me seeks to recover an American tradition of evaluating the "dialectic of the Enlightenment."
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Focusing on the work of six individuals - Robert Hayden, William Demby, Paule Marshall, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W. E. B. Du Bois - Mercy, Mercy Me recovers an American tradition of evaluating the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Hall argues that the cultural actors he describes reflect and embody the complex connections of race and nation. Cosmopolitan in outlook and critical of a culture of congratulation, they highlight the close relationship between slavery and the construction of American citizenship as they document the destructive influences wrought upon the self by consumer capitalism, technology, and ritualized violence. The course of this study reveals an essential concern at the core of African-American art in the sixties - that the longing to look backward is always in danger of lapsing into nostalgia and so must constantly struggle with the horror of the very past it would champion. In its original account of black artistry and its recovery of overlooked works of the period, Mercy, Mercy Me marks a major contribution to our understanding of 1960s American culture.
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