Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2000

Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 308 pp. $15.95 paper. This collection of related essays by one of our finest cultural historians is an indispensable volume for any African Americanist. The essays are grouped in four parts-Slavery, the Arts, and Resistance; Classical Black Nationalism; Poetry and the Novel; and The Arts, Cultural Theory, and History-but they come together into a remarkably coherent whole around the legacy of the African ethos as it passed through the cauldron of oppression.

Though the literary scholar may focus on the warm appreciation of Sterling Brown and the two strikingly original essays on Melville's Benito Cereno, the other essays are equally rewarding, from the first on slavery times "through the prism of folklore" on to nineteenth-century black nationalism, then to Paul Robeson as culture hero, and finally to the role of music in the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the subtitle might appropriately s ubstitute music for art, since graphic art is not emphasized. Well written and deeply researched, Going Through the Storm is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship.