The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book

American Visions, April, 1996 by Dale Edwyna Smith

The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book edited by Black Public Sphere Collective (University of Chicago. 1995. Cloth, $35; paper, $17.95)--According to Houston Baker Jr., in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr.'s voice simultaneously defined and expanded the black public sphere. How far we have come since then is traced in Elizabeth Alexander's analysis of responses to the videotape of Rodney King's beating by Los Angeles police officers, especially its impact on both the image of black men in America and the uses of "communally witnessed violence" in our culture. These and the other articles collected here work well together to describe a chronology of the African-American role in reshaping American politics, culture, gender and class definitions. The articles range from the slave trade to the present and explore the significance (both to blacks and to others) of the attempted appropriations of black forms and styles by the so-called mainstream. This work--sophisticated, complicated--is useful for researchers but is not designed for the general reader.

Dale Edwyna Smith is an assistant professor of American history and Afro-American history at Washington University in St. Louis whose reviews have appeared in Southern Review and Belles Lettres. Her last article for American Visions, "Recent and Relevant History Books," appeared in the February/ March issue.