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Article: Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. By ROSS POSNOCK. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 1998. x + 353 pp. 21.95 [pounds sterling].
The concept of the modern intellectual, in Ross Posnock's normative use of the term, first took shape in the wake of the 1898 Dreyfus affair, when an assortment of writers and thinkers, branded by their opponents as deracinated cosmopolitan meddlers, undertook to challenge the received dichotomy between aesthetics and politics, and to renounce the ancestral imperatives of race and nation in favour of 'universal' ideals. Focusing on matters American, Posnock's aim is to recover and ...