Mercy, Mercy Me

[Dave Monroe]

Hall, James.  Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American
   Culture and the American Sixties.  New York:
   Oxford UP, 2001.

"... James C. Hall argues that African-American
artistry in the sixties can be understood as one of
the most vital and compelling homegrown interrogations
of modernity. 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 our Enlightenment inheritance.

"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 backwards 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."

http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0195096096.html

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