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To be middle-aged, gifted and black: mourning without melancholia

Mourning without melancholia has become a mantra for cultural critics who arrived too late to say anything at the first large-scale Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung in 1955, or the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956. Mindful of melancholic attachments to the struggles of anticolonial intellectuals during the cold war, prominent representatives of a postBandung generation rarely read Frantz Fanon as though they were about to join him in the trenches of the liberation struggle (Scott 1999, p. 199). Developing a different form of cosmopolitan commitment, distinguished professors such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Gilroy have taken on the ethically charged role of translator in order to answer the challenges of postmodern society. The recent attempts of Gates and Gilroy to spread the mission of their generation beyond the ivory tower have been praised by Cornel West, Anthony Appiah and other prominent members of their peer group. Alongside these celebrations of the ‘wit’, ‘good humor’ and ‘accessibility’ of the books under review, Gates and Gilroy have provided collegial support to each other’s projects. On the jacket cover of Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gilroy lauds Gates’s engagement with critical work from the UK, the USA and France for its ‘worldly history’ of Cultural Studies; on the jacket cover of Darker than Blue, Gates offers Gilroy plaudits for his ability to address the basic tensions within African-American culture. Such testimonials are calls to debate national consciousness and new humanism rather than manifestos for anti-essentialists of the world to unite. While Gilroy’s publicity material for Tradition and the Black Atlantic highlights the book’s relevance to planetary humanists (reading one of the leading figures in African-American Studies in terms of his own commitment to a transcultural and outernational culture), Gates’s blurb emphasises the relevance of Darker than Blue to the study of African-American literature and culture (discovering one driving concern for Gilroy’s work: ‘the interweaving of ethics and aesthetics, through the example of the African-American tradition’).