July 2, 2002
MAKING CORNEL WEST LOOK SCHOLARLY :
Assignment America: Literary blackface? (John Bloom, 6/24/2002, UPI)Was Hannah Crafts really a black woman? Was she really a slave? How do we know she wasn't a tea-sipping housewife in Morristown who wanted to help abolish slavery? I'm just not as convinced as everyone else seems to be that this "new" slave novel is authentic. [...]
[Henry Louis] Gates is, of course, the chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department and probably the most famous scholar of black history and literature in America. And it was Gates, in fact, who purchased "The Bondwoman's Narrative" from Swann Galleries last year. So obviously, as a literary event, this has as much to do with Gates as it does with the quality of the lost novel.
Gates even tells us in his introduction that he felt a thrill when he found the manuscript in the auction catalog. "If the author was black," he says, "then this 'fictionalized slave narrative' -- an autobiographical novel apparently based upon a female fugitive slave's life in bondage in North Carolina and her escape to freedom in the North -- would be a major discovery, possibly the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave."
He buys the manuscript even before reading it--he was the only bidder--and then sets out to find out who Hannah Crafts was and authenticate her race. When you think about it, this alone is a strange thing to do--as if proving she was black is more important than finding out what her thoughts, dreams and aspirations were, or, more to the point, whether she wrote anything of lasting value.
At any rate, Gates sets out on his quest, and here's what he finds...
This just a hoot.