from The Washington Post
"A Home Elsewhere," by Robert Stepto, & "Losing My Cool," by Thomas Williams
Reviewed by Jabari Asim
Sunday, July 25, 2010; B06
A HOME ELSEWHERE
Reading African American Classics In the Age of Obama
By Robert B. Stepto
Harvard Univ.
179 pp. $22.95
LOSING MY COOL
How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Penguin Press.
225 pp. $24.95
In these two slender, provocative volumes, a pair of African American thinkers confront questions of art, life and culture in a society in which "the vistas of circumstance have opened up . . . dramatically" for blacks in the United States. That phrase comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose "Losing My Cool" starts out as an explicit argument about "loss of discipline and spirit in the hip-hop era" and shape-shifts into an engaging, well-written memoir.
Robert B. Stepto, a literary scholar at Yale, sets out to discover a new cultural context in which books by African American authors might be viewed. He writes that he wants to pay attention to "how we read African-American literature at the present moment." Expanded from a series of lectures, "A Home Elsewhere" is directed at a very select "we." Essays such as "Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony" aren't for the lay reader, and some of them touch only briefly on "the age of Obama" as a launching pad to other academic explorations. Still, Stepto discusses literature about as well as anyone, and it's a genuine pleasure to follow his joyful excursions through Douglass, Du Bois, Morrison and others.
Like Obama, Thomas Chatterton Williams has a white mother and a black father. Obama described his adolescent tussling with blackness as a "fitful interior struggle," but Williams, whose parents gave him a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" when he was 7, approached blackness with ease. "I didn't ever wish to be white," he writes early in his memoir, which had its seed in an essay he wrote for The Washington Post. But both Williams and Obama sought hints from the larger culture regarding how to pull off what each considered a convincing black pose. Williams, who was born in 1981, paid attention to other black boys who frequented the barbershop where he got his hair cut. "These boys became like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces, the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms, the way they slapped hands in the street." Although a dutiful son and a reliable student, Williams found himself torn between the "florid second tongue" spoken on Black Entertainment Television and the "staid and familiar language" that his father favored.
Stepto took the title of his book from Frederick Douglass who, when his family failed to shelter him, "looked for home elsewhere." It's an archetypal journey, according to Stepto, in which "the created self attaches to community, and is in a real sense fully created through that attachment." Williams, on the other hand, despite growing up in what seems like a model household, looked for a home in the tumult of hip-hop. His memoir details his struggles with the self that emerged. As Williams tells it, his neighborhood celebrated ignorance and disdained courtesy and scholarship. "Coming up," he recalls, "I hadn't had the courage or the imagination to go against my neighborhood's grain, to be that kid who says: Screw it. I'm different." Despite his conformity -- and perhaps because of his parents' careful attention -- he still performed well enough in high school to gain acceptance to several of the best colleges in the country.
He chose Georgetown, where he struggled at first and skipped many of his classes. "Plenty of mornings degenerated into afternoons and then early evenings as I lamped in bed, BET thumping, the Big Tymers popping yellow bottles of Cristal and flashing iced-out grimaces, glaring at the camera lens, imploring all the young black men tuning in across the nation not to get to class but to get our roll on." For Williams, the worst of hip-hop philosophy was hugely influential on Georgetown's black ruling caste, some of whom, he says, "could freestyle at house parties but could not read at grade level."
After a childish prank backfired, Williams found himself exiled from the black cliques on campus. He "started hanging with armchair philosophers and intellectual showoffs" who laughed in your face if you revealed a weak vocabulary or lack of familiarity with Pynchon or Descartes. His perspective expands through these newfound friendships, drawing him into a deep study of Western philosophy and travel and away from what he eventually regards as the excesses of hip-hop. Williams finds a home in the world, and in the process stumbles, happily, toward his true self.
Stepto would probably agree that Williams's intellectual coming of age fits neatly into the tradition initiated by Douglass and sustained recently by Obama. Like Douglass, Williams was liberated not only by embracing new things but also by leaving things behind. He writes: "Concepts such as time and independence and freedom began to strike me on an intuitive level as more luxurious and precise than foreign cars and necklaces of gold. The thought that I could make a living reading or thinking was inspiring and even humbling."
We now have multiple generations of writers who have written supportively and critically of hip-hop's influence on black masculinity, including Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan and Adam Bradley. Williams comes down firmly as a naysayer. Two things save his impassioned denunciation from predictable ranting. One, he writes not as a distant scholar who has spent little actual time in "the field" but as a man who has spent much of his young life eagerly immersed in the rhythms and trends of hip-hop. Two, he reserves his harshest criticism for himself. Williams makes clear that no one forced him to absorb hip-hop's most destructive values. After a run-in with a classmate, he reflects, "I was in college, not in the street. Why was I fronting like I was in the street? Why did I always front like I was in the street?" This leads him ultimately to ask a larger question: "Are we bound to keep this culture that was born in negativity running in perpetuity?"
It would be a shame if Williams's thoughtful comments about hip-hop, which deserve and undoubtedly will receive articulate response, detract attention from other equally engaging portions of "Losing My Cool." For example, his portrait of his dad, an intensely private man, contains some of the most compelling writing about black fathers in recent literature on the subject. There is much to admire in "Losing My Cool," and more to anticipate from Williams.
***
Jabari Asim's most recent book is "A Taste Of Honey: Stories."
Reviewed by Jabari Asim
Sunday, July 25, 2010; B06
A HOME ELSEWHERE
Reading African American Classics In the Age of Obama
By Robert B. Stepto
Harvard Univ.
179 pp. $22.95
LOSING MY COOL
How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Penguin Press.
225 pp. $24.95
In these two slender, provocative volumes, a pair of African American thinkers confront questions of art, life and culture in a society in which "the vistas of circumstance have opened up . . . dramatically" for blacks in the United States. That phrase comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose "Losing My Cool" starts out as an explicit argument about "loss of discipline and spirit in the hip-hop era" and shape-shifts into an engaging, well-written memoir.
Robert B. Stepto, a literary scholar at Yale, sets out to discover a new cultural context in which books by African American authors might be viewed. He writes that he wants to pay attention to "how we read African-American literature at the present moment." Expanded from a series of lectures, "A Home Elsewhere" is directed at a very select "we." Essays such as "Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony" aren't for the lay reader, and some of them touch only briefly on "the age of Obama" as a launching pad to other academic explorations. Still, Stepto discusses literature about as well as anyone, and it's a genuine pleasure to follow his joyful excursions through Douglass, Du Bois, Morrison and others.
Like Obama, Thomas Chatterton Williams has a white mother and a black father. Obama described his adolescent tussling with blackness as a "fitful interior struggle," but Williams, whose parents gave him a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" when he was 7, approached blackness with ease. "I didn't ever wish to be white," he writes early in his memoir, which had its seed in an essay he wrote for The Washington Post. But both Williams and Obama sought hints from the larger culture regarding how to pull off what each considered a convincing black pose. Williams, who was born in 1981, paid attention to other black boys who frequented the barbershop where he got his hair cut. "These boys became like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces, the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms, the way they slapped hands in the street." Although a dutiful son and a reliable student, Williams found himself torn between the "florid second tongue" spoken on Black Entertainment Television and the "staid and familiar language" that his father favored.
Stepto took the title of his book from Frederick Douglass who, when his family failed to shelter him, "looked for home elsewhere." It's an archetypal journey, according to Stepto, in which "the created self attaches to community, and is in a real sense fully created through that attachment." Williams, on the other hand, despite growing up in what seems like a model household, looked for a home in the tumult of hip-hop. His memoir details his struggles with the self that emerged. As Williams tells it, his neighborhood celebrated ignorance and disdained courtesy and scholarship. "Coming up," he recalls, "I hadn't had the courage or the imagination to go against my neighborhood's grain, to be that kid who says: Screw it. I'm different." Despite his conformity -- and perhaps because of his parents' careful attention -- he still performed well enough in high school to gain acceptance to several of the best colleges in the country.
He chose Georgetown, where he struggled at first and skipped many of his classes. "Plenty of mornings degenerated into afternoons and then early evenings as I lamped in bed, BET thumping, the Big Tymers popping yellow bottles of Cristal and flashing iced-out grimaces, glaring at the camera lens, imploring all the young black men tuning in across the nation not to get to class but to get our roll on." For Williams, the worst of hip-hop philosophy was hugely influential on Georgetown's black ruling caste, some of whom, he says, "could freestyle at house parties but could not read at grade level."
After a childish prank backfired, Williams found himself exiled from the black cliques on campus. He "started hanging with armchair philosophers and intellectual showoffs" who laughed in your face if you revealed a weak vocabulary or lack of familiarity with Pynchon or Descartes. His perspective expands through these newfound friendships, drawing him into a deep study of Western philosophy and travel and away from what he eventually regards as the excesses of hip-hop. Williams finds a home in the world, and in the process stumbles, happily, toward his true self.
Stepto would probably agree that Williams's intellectual coming of age fits neatly into the tradition initiated by Douglass and sustained recently by Obama. Like Douglass, Williams was liberated not only by embracing new things but also by leaving things behind. He writes: "Concepts such as time and independence and freedom began to strike me on an intuitive level as more luxurious and precise than foreign cars and necklaces of gold. The thought that I could make a living reading or thinking was inspiring and even humbling."
We now have multiple generations of writers who have written supportively and critically of hip-hop's influence on black masculinity, including Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan and Adam Bradley. Williams comes down firmly as a naysayer. Two things save his impassioned denunciation from predictable ranting. One, he writes not as a distant scholar who has spent little actual time in "the field" but as a man who has spent much of his young life eagerly immersed in the rhythms and trends of hip-hop. Two, he reserves his harshest criticism for himself. Williams makes clear that no one forced him to absorb hip-hop's most destructive values. After a run-in with a classmate, he reflects, "I was in college, not in the street. Why was I fronting like I was in the street? Why did I always front like I was in the street?" This leads him ultimately to ask a larger question: "Are we bound to keep this culture that was born in negativity running in perpetuity?"
It would be a shame if Williams's thoughtful comments about hip-hop, which deserve and undoubtedly will receive articulate response, detract attention from other equally engaging portions of "Losing My Cool." For example, his portrait of his dad, an intensely private man, contains some of the most compelling writing about black fathers in recent literature on the subject. There is much to admire in "Losing My Cool," and more to anticipate from Williams.
***
Jabari Asim's most recent book is "A Taste Of Honey: Stories."
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