At the Center of This Discourse
Independent Lens: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
Early in his career, Herskovits probably thought that if only people knew more about Africa and more about black people, they would be less ignorant and that racism would wither away. But by the end of his career, he understood that racism was a much more intractable problem than that.
—Vincent Brown
The story of Melville J. Herskovits is at once familiar and peculiar. “I think of him as kind of like the Elvis of black American studies,” says Harvard historian Vincent Brown. Like Presley, he appropriates from an existing culture, in his study and support of black Americans at a time of overt racism and oppression, the 1930s–‘50s. But even as he “mainstreams some of these ideas about the relationship between Africa and African American culture,” Herskovits also misunderstands, exploits, and evaluates his object of study. And so his relationship to that object remains vexed.
The anthropologist himself becomes an object in Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, premiering this week in PBS’ Independent Lens series. Llew Smith’s 58-minute film traces Herskovits’ career, from his early interests in “others” as a child (his daughter Jean Herskovits Corry shows a 1911 photo of her then 15-year-old father alongside Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries, suggesting that he “must have been in the thick of battle”) to his to work with Franz Boaz at Columbia to his founding of the first major American program in African studies at Northwestern, in 1948. When, in 1961, John Kennedy considered (but did not select) Herskovits to head a new bureau of African Affairs, the film indicates that his support of decolonization in Africa—not to mention his membership in some 17 groups judged “communist front organizations” by HUAC—thwarted his appointment.
Herskovits helped to develop the concept of cultural relativism, as he tried to see his objects—primarily African and American “Negro” communities—without the bias of his own background. His book The Myth of the Negro Past made the controversial case that black Americans maintained African traditions, and further that race was a cultural and sociological construction, rather than biological.
Read the Full Review @ Popmatters
Independent Lens: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
Early in his career, Herskovits probably thought that if only people knew more about Africa and more about black people, they would be less ignorant and that racism would wither away. But by the end of his career, he understood that racism was a much more intractable problem than that.
—Vincent Brown
The story of Melville J. Herskovits is at once familiar and peculiar. “I think of him as kind of like the Elvis of black American studies,” says Harvard historian Vincent Brown. Like Presley, he appropriates from an existing culture, in his study and support of black Americans at a time of overt racism and oppression, the 1930s–‘50s. But even as he “mainstreams some of these ideas about the relationship between Africa and African American culture,” Herskovits also misunderstands, exploits, and evaluates his object of study. And so his relationship to that object remains vexed.
The anthropologist himself becomes an object in Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, premiering this week in PBS’ Independent Lens series. Llew Smith’s 58-minute film traces Herskovits’ career, from his early interests in “others” as a child (his daughter Jean Herskovits Corry shows a 1911 photo of her then 15-year-old father alongside Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries, suggesting that he “must have been in the thick of battle”) to his to work with Franz Boaz at Columbia to his founding of the first major American program in African studies at Northwestern, in 1948. When, in 1961, John Kennedy considered (but did not select) Herskovits to head a new bureau of African Affairs, the film indicates that his support of decolonization in Africa—not to mention his membership in some 17 groups judged “communist front organizations” by HUAC—thwarted his appointment.
Herskovits helped to develop the concept of cultural relativism, as he tried to see his objects—primarily African and American “Negro” communities—without the bias of his own background. His book The Myth of the Negro Past made the controversial case that black Americans maintained African traditions, and further that race was a cultural and sociological construction, rather than biological.
Read the Full Review @ Popmatters
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