Review for Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940 : This book is incredible, I have never been so frightened reading a book and yet so riveted that I couldn't stop reading. I loved this book. It grabbed me from the first page and I had trouble putting it down. Read it, you won't be disappointed.
Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940 info
How do we balance the desire for tales of exceptional accomplishment with the need for painful doses of reality? How hard do we work to remember our past or to forget it? These are some of the questions that Jonathan Scott Holloway addresses in this exploration of race memory from the dawn of the modern civil rights era to the present. Relying on social science, documentary film, dance, popular literature, museums, memoir, and the tourism trade, Holloway explores the stories black Americans have told about their past and why these stories are vital to understanding a modern black identity. In the process, Holloway asks much larger questions about the value of history and facts when memories do violence to both.
Making discoveries about his own past while researching this book, Holloway weaves first-person and family memories into the traditional third-person historian's perspective. The result is a highly readable, rich, and deeply personal narrative that will be familiar to some, s
