Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

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''Call Me America'': The Construction of Race, Identity, and History in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Wonders of
the African World
Zine Magubane
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 2003 3: 247
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603254351
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10.1177/1532708603254351
Cultural Studies
Magubane
CallMeCritical
America
Methodologies August 2003
ARTICLE
Call Me America: The Construction of

Race, Identity, and History in Henry Louis
Gates Jr.s Wonders of the African World
Zine Magubane
University of Illinois, Urbana
The article analyzes Henry Louis Gates Jr.s six-part, 12-hour documentary,
Wonders of the African World, and the fierce debates that occurred
between Africana and African Americans about issues of race, identity,
and history in the wake of the videos release. The article explores the ways
in which questions about racial identity, the relationship of African Americans to Africa, and the politics of history were framed in the film and how
this relates to larger societal debates about Africans and African Americans in the academy, race and citizenship, and identity and narrative
authority.
Keywords: race in cyberspace; race in film; African film; digital divide
Introduction: Call Me America

The Holy Land, Volume 2 of Henry Louis Gates Jr.s (1999b) much
talked about series, Wonders of the African World, includes a revealing exchange
between Professor Gates and an Ethiopian woman. On learning the womans
name is Ethiopia, Gates, ever the comedian, quips, Well you can just call me
America. Although the remark was obviously made in jest, it speaks volumes
about the entire series. In particular, it brings to the fore questions such as,
How does Gates function and position himself as a narrator? To whom is he
speaking? How does his perception of audience influence his narrative choices?
These questions open the door to a host of other related questions regarding
how Professor Gates is positioned and has positioned himself within African
and African American studies, how he functions as a Black public intellectual,
and his relationship to the communities that he studies. In particular, it raises
the question of who is authorized to speak for Africa and African Americans
and who bestows the authority to speak for these constituencies. The importance of the question of authorial intent is clearly evidenced by Gatess explanations of his motivations for making the series as well as by the type of commentary (both positive and negative) that occurred after the video was publicly
released. Indeed, as will be shown below, there is a lack of fit between ProfesCultural Studies Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 3, 2003 247-270
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603254351
2003 Sage Publications
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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies August 2003
sor Gatess public articulations of the intended audience and purpose of the
video and the manner in which he performs as narrator and author. This
schism between stated intentions and actual performance was not, I will argue,
accidental. An examination of the deliberate moments of schizophrenia that
punctuate the series is critical for understanding not only its content and ideological thrust but also how it has been received by different audiences.
In Search of a Useable History:
Who Speaks for Africas Past?
Henry Louis Gates Jr. may well be one of the most famous Black intellectuals alive today. Since taking over the Department of African-American Studies
at Harvard University in 1991, his every move has been documented by scholars and lay people, Black and White. As might be expected, when his six-part,
12-hour documentary, Wonders of the African World, premiered in the fall of
1999, it received a tremendous amount of attention and provoked a storm of
commentary. Soon after the series premiered in the fall of 1999, a vigorous
debate ensued, most of which took place in cyberspace. Listservers, discussion
groups, and chat rooms came alive as Africanists and African Americanists, historians, literary critics, and ordinary people weighed in on the merits and
demerits of the program and its companion volume of the same name. It was
this wide divergence of opinion and the vigor with which Gatess supporters
and detractors weighed in on the series that lead me to review the debate generated by the series, examining some of the key protagonists and issues. To this
end, I looked at three sets of commentaries: first, press and public reviews garnered from newspapers and Amazon.com; second, those posted on two academic discussion lists, the H-Net Discussion List for African American Studies
(H-Afro-Am) and the H-Net Discussion for African History and Culture (HAfrica); and third, the special issue on the series by the online journal West
Africa Review.
Not surprisingly, the fact that Gates is an African American and the influence this had on the way in which he narrated and experienced Africa recurred
time and time again in discussion of the series. The most vigorous discussions
and debates occurred over whether Gates was targeting the video at Black or
White audiences. Significant numbers of Gatess detractors criticized the series
for its Eurocentric presentation of both Africans and African Americans.
Indeed, many African American scholars felt that Gates was not speaking on
behalf of or to them but to and for White America. For Molefi Asante, the
doyen of Afrocentric scholarship, there was no doubt that the series was irredeemably Eurocentricironically saved from public outcry because Gates is
Black. Specifically, Asante attacked the series for reinforcing stereotypes created by generations of European travelers that Africa is backward, inadequate,
and scary. Asante (2000) complained that
Magubane Call Me America
if Gates were a white traveler in Africa commenting as he did on African society,

making jokes about dignitaries, and sowing seeds of division between African
people, the NAACP, NABSE [National Alliance of Black School Educators], and
a host of civil rights leaders would have considered this production an insult and
an assault on African people. However, because he is black we must it call it a
travesty. This travesty will set back the intellectual discourse on the African
enslavement for fifty years if the narrative is not corrected.
One particularly irate participant in the H-Afro-Am wrote,

Gates Wonders of the African World is not a story of one mans quest for identity as the Roots television series attempted to establish. Rather, the program
must be viewed as a sonnet of white supremacist affirmation. . . . The bottom line
is that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his Wonders of the African World, were not
made to educate blacks or whites about Africa, but to absolve whites of their guilt
over the historical sins of their ancestors and their present day racist behavior.
(H-Afro-AM@H.Net.MSU.edu, December 19, 1999)
Many who defended the series, however, did so on the grounds that it was
speaking from an African American viewpoint, was largely intended for African Americans, and, therefore, could not possibly be racist or White supremacist. One contributor to the H-Africa listserv, for example, praised the video in
strong terms for its Afrocentrist viewpoint. Setting aside issues regarding
occasional factual errors and the Harvard Big Man goes to Africa flair, he
suggested,
I do believe that Gates perspective is a new one. His was the first such series presented from an overtly African American perspective. I found his frequent references to how the reality of Africa (as he saw it) compared to African-American
barber-shop and student movement images of Africa to be very interesting. More
so, I found his willingness to address popular African-American mythologies of
Africa (his aggressive attack on the idea that Africans played no part in selling
fellow Africans, in particular, but also his repeated comparisons of AfricanAmerican and African racial identity) to be most remarkable. (H-Africa@
H.Net.MSU.edu, November 2, 1999)
Those academics more sympathetic to Gates and his project further defended
the series on the grounds that it was aimed at a less sophisticated or lay audience, rather than at them. One writer to H-Africa surmised that Gatess casual
approach was an attempt to engage an audience with little exposure to Africa
(November 4, 1999). It is important to note that the notion of lay audience
was also profoundly racialized, the dominant assumption being that
Afrocentrist African Americans constituted the bulk of this unsophisticated
viewing audience. One supporter of Gates on the H-Africa listserv, for example, defended Gatess focus on the complicity of Africans in the slave trade
an obsession that the writer himself deemed both obsessive and disturbingon the grounds that it operated as a necessary corrective for what he
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termed the high degree of romantic racialism in African-Americans (December 19, 1999). A participant in the H-Africa discussion group defended Gates
on similar grounds, writing that the series was a popular history for popular
consumption and would have a powerful and personal appeal to African
American students (December 19, 1999). Another post to the same list noted
that the series was an important corrective to African-American barber-shop
and student movement images of Africa and lauded Gates for his willingness
to address popular African-American mythologies of Africa (December 19,
1999).
The responses from African American listserv participants, however, suggest that the series was far from representative of African American popular or
scholarly perspectives. Indeed, some of the most vehement criticisms against
the series have come from African Americans. Perhaps the angriest response
came from a writer to H-Afro-Am, who denounced the series as intellectual
buck dancing and Gates as a black ambassador of Eurocentrism and white
supremacy who demonstrated a severe detachment from African people
(November 23, 1999). The outrage of this writer to H-Africa is typical:
As an African American and a scholar, I found the Henry Louis Gates documentary embarrassing and disappointing. Dr. Gates often makes a point of saying
that his Harvard Black Studies department is a Dream Team of brilliant scholars. . . . However, being black and a Ph.D. does not automatically make a person
an expert on everything concerning people of similar pigmentation. The Gates
series to me seems to be guilty of academic laziness. (H-Africa@H.Net.MSU.
edu, November 5, 1999)
Gwendolyn Mikell (2000), an African American and former president of the African Studies Association, described the series as disrespectful, full of distortions and
errors, and devoid of historical and cultural context. We have been betrayed! she
declared in an address before the African Studies Association in 1999.
It seems to me that Gates has crafted his own attack on Afrocentric views of the
greatness of Africa. It seems to me that the Gates video attempts to paint a picture
of an imaginary divide between African-American and African views of the Continent and its views in history. As an African-American, this offends me and
many others among my colleagues greatly.
Mikells comments get to the heart of what lay behind the making of, and
the vigorous debates that ensued over, Wonders of the African Worldthe struggle to define what a properly Afrocentrist theoretical enterprise can and should
look like. Afrocentrism is a highly controversial theoretical and political movement, which has been accused of a wide assortment of intellectual crimes,
including reverse racism (Loury, 1997), therapeutic mythology (Walker,
2001), and teaching myth as history (Lefkowitz, 1996). At first glance, it
would appear that Gatess academic concerns have no connection to a move-
ment that most mainstream scholars dismiss out of hand as intellectually bankrupt. When we view the series within the context of Gatess larger body of work,
however, it is clear that his intellectual agenda is, in actual fact, not so far from
that articulated by his archrival, Molefi Kete Asante, the leading Afrocentric
spokesman in the United States and, arguably, one of the most controversial
academics currently working in the field of African American studies. According to Asante (n.d.),
Afrocentricity seeks to re-locate the African person as an agent in human history. . . . Afrocentricity as a theory of change intends to relocate the African person as subject, thus destroying the notion of being objects in the Western project
of domination.
Gatess own work, starting with an essay he penned in 1984 titled Criticism in the
Jungle, has been oriented around precisely that same concern. Indeed, Gates has
spent the past two decades attempting to construct a viable interpretation of history
that places African peoples (including those in the diaspora) at the center and casts
them as agentic subjectsactively creating their own history, albeit under conditions of extreme oppression. In the 1984 piece, Gates attempted to lay out the theoretical basis for the development of the study of African American culture, which
foregrounds its distinctiveness and meaning within the context of African Americans struggles for equality. To this end, he attempted to lay out a culturally specific
theory of African American literature that derived its principles from the black tradition itself . . . in the idiom which constitutes the language of blackness, the signifying difference which makes the black tradition our very own (Gates, 1984, p. 8).
This project necessarily involved unpacking the connections between African
American cultural practices and their sister practices in Africa. Hence, The
Signifying Monkey was Gatess (1988) first full-fledged attempt to set forth an
Africanist theory of literary criticism generated from within the black tradition
itself, autonomously (p. xx). In the text, Gates argued that various African myths
and performance styles not only survived the middle passage but also recombined
to form a New World African culture. He followed that text with another, Figures
in Black, in which he took as his aim the redefining of the academy away from a
Eurocentric notion of a hierarchical canon of textsmostly white, Western, and
maleand encourag[ing] and sustain[ing] a truly comparative and pluralistic
notion of the institution of literature (Gates, 1989, xx). In the introduction to the
text, Gates charged the Anglo-American academy with being blind to the fact that
the hegemony implicit in the phrase the Western tradition reflects material
relationships primarily and not so-called universal, transcendent normative values. Value is specific, both culturally and temporally. The sometimes vulgar
nationalism implicit in would be literary categories . . . are extraliterary designations of control, symbolic of material and concomitant political relations, rather
than literary ones. We, the scholars of our profession, must eschew these catego-
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ries of domination and ideology and insist upon the fundamental redefinition of
what it is to speak of the canon. (Gates, 1989, xx)
Figures in Black, therefore, was an exercise in naming indigenous black principles

of criticism and applying these to explicate our own texts (Gates, 1989, pp. xx-xxi).
This is not at all far from Asantes (n.d.) claim that
Afrocentricity is not the reverse of Eurocentricity, but a particular perspective for
analysis which does not seek to occupy all space and time as Eurocentrism has
often done. For example, to say classical music [or] theater is usually a reference
to European music, dance, and theater. However, this means that Europeans
occupy all of the intellectual and artistic seats and leave no room for others. The
Afrocentrists argue for pluralism in philosophical views without hierarchy. All
cultural centers must be respected; this is the fundamental aim of Afrocentricity.
The fact that Wonders represents Gatess latest foray into the terrain of
Afrocentrism is further evidenced by the fact that in the promotional material
for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Gates pitched the video as an exercise in revisionist history, aimed at rewriting colonialist and White supremacist
narratives of Africa. Gates asserted that part of the inspiration for the video
came from his experience of viewing Adam Clarks Civilization series as a child,
which kindled his desire to make a similar epic about Africa. Likewise, U.S.
News & World Report described the series as an attempt to debunk the Enlightenment charge that Africa had no indigenous civilization (Tolson, 1999).
Gates offered a virtually identical explanation of his aims for making the video
in the promotional material for the series, as well as in a number of published
interviews. In an October 1999 issue of Antenna, for example, he commented
that as an African American, he was aware of the pain of having his history stolen from him. He went on to explain that this pain was the impetus for bringing the lost African world into the consciousness of the larger American public. It is important to debunk the myth of Africa being this benighted
continent civilized only when white people arrived, he explained (Dr. Henry
Louis Gates Jr. Reveals, 1999). Thus, if one goes by the official narrative, it
would appear that Gatess project shares some affinity with what is usually
described as an Afrocentrist epistemology. Furthermore, it appears that the
importance of this kind of history as corrective exercise was confirmed and
supported by his sponsors as well as by mainstream academic and journalistic
opinion. Thus, when the series is viewed within the context of Gatess overall
body of scholarship, it is clear that this project represents Gatess latest attempt
to capture the attention of the lay public and institutionalize his own version of
Afrocentrism. His version, unlike Asantes and other popular versions, ultimately maintains a critical engagement with European high theory and,
more important, seeks to avoid confusing [his] experiences as an Afro-American
with the black act of language that defines a text (Gates, 1989, p. xxi).
It is for this reason that despite the series stated aim of providing a corrective
to Eurocentric myths, however, in practice it expends equal, if not greater,
energy on discussing and exposing Afrocentrist myths about Africa. Indeed,
the video careens between the two epistemological projects in ways that are
both schizophrenic and deeply troubling. Although Gates makes repeated reference to the pernicious ways in which racist scholarship and practice have systematically suppressed and denied Africas unique and important role in the
making of world history, his modes of address consistently frame the project as
an exercise devoted to exposing African American (mis)understandings of
Africa to the light of academic reason.
For example, in the first volume of the series, Black Kingdoms of the Nile,
Gates (1999b) begins with a brief discussion of the impact of racism on popular
understandings of Africa and African history. However, this epistemological
project is consistently undermined and overshadowed by his caricatured and
dismissive portrayal of African American consciousness of Africa. Gates paints
an extremely unflattering portrait of African Americans as people who prefer to
get their information about Africa from barbershop lore and rap music than
reputable academic sources. At various times, the video is punctuated by Gates
speaking directly into the camera to explain the African American perspective on Africa by means of anecdotes that are meant to entertain the audience
and, in the process, construct African Americans as uneducated, naive, and
silly. For example, Gates describes with great amusement the number of African American establishments, products, and organizations in the Boston/
Cambridge area with the word Nubian in their titles. He uses this as evidence of
the unsophisticated (and therefore illegitimate) way in which African Americans, as a diasporic community, have constructed a narrative of their relationship to Africa. He concludes with much bemusement that whereas his fathers
generation went by the collective name Negro, which eventually gave way to
Black and then African American, his own grandchildren would likely bear
the title neo-Nubians. One wonders if Gates has noticed the number of bars
in the Cambridge/Boston area bearing names such as McGintys, Seamus
McNabs, and Ye Olde Irish Pubwhich outnumber their nubian counterparts 20 to 1! Would he dare to dismiss and delegitimize the importance and
relevance of a diasporic consciousness among Irish Americans because of their
existence?
Paradoxically, Gatess tendency to make folk wisdom the epistemological
locus of African and African American knowledge production worked to effectively deny the very existence of African and African American studies. Despite
the fact that the promotional material for the series (and Gates himself through
his repeated references to his beloved Harvard) makes much of the fact that
Gates is chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard and
directs the W. E. B. DuBois Institute, there is nary an instance in the video in
which African studies or African American studies are presented as disciplines
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with significant epistemological and theoretical divisions that arise from,

reflect, and affect a diverse array of popular understandings of Black culture,
politics, and history. Given the diversity of scholarly opinions available within
his own universityparticularly among his self-assembled dream team of
Black intellectualsone can only speculate why it never occurred to Gates to
have them speak to the array of opinions on subjects such as slavery or diasporic
modes of consciousness. Instead of making blanket assertions to the effect that
all African Americans share a unified, singular, and knee-jerk Afrocentrist sensibility, he could easily have interviewed ordinary African Americans alongside scholars such as Molefe Asante, Paul Gilroy, or his Harvard colleagues
Orlando Patterson, Anthony Appiah, and James Lorand Matory. This would
have effectively showcased the diversity of views on the African diaspora and
demonstrated that Afrocentrism is just one theoretical position among many.
In this way, he could have demonstrated that diasporic consciousness, like
every other subject taken up within the purview of African and African American studies, is a vigorously debated theoretical problematic, subject to competing modes of analysis. This method would have given scholars and lay people
alike more food for thought than Gatess random observations and could easily
have been done in ways accessible to a lay audience. Indeed, the technique of
employing experts to ventriloquize and thereby represent different politicotheoretical positions has been usefully employed by a number of immensely
successful infotainment shows such as 20/20, Dateline NBC, and Good Morning America (to name just a few) for decades.
Race in Cyberspace: Talking About the
Talk About Wonders of the African World
Why did the series generate so much debate? I believe there are four interrelated factors. First, Africa is notable for its absence in the American popular
media, especially on television, except for occasional negative news reports
about the latest calamity to befall the continent, from hunger and disease to
coups and wars. Consequently, a major television series was bound to raise
enormous interest, at least among African migrants in the United States, African Americans, and Africas assorted friends. This is connected to a second factor, namely that the numbers of African intellectuals in American universities
have increased over the past two decades. Besieged as they often are by isolation
and cultural and racial alienation, and connected through the Internet and the
conference circuit, the migrant African intellectuals are anxious and able to
defend against defamations of Africa coming from any quarter. The third factor has to do with the fact that this was the first major television series by an
African American. Given that African Americans are rarely seen in the establishment media and in the academy as experts on Africa, the series carried disproportionate weight of representation in ways that a series by a White Ameri-
can would not have. Connected to this, finally, is the fact it was produced by
Gates, a person less known for his African expertise than for his position as a
leading figure in African American studies and for his role as a so-called public
intellectual.
The debate that ensued over Wonders highlights the extent to which the
Internet has profoundly influenced traditional modes of academic debate and
critical exchange by reopening up channels of communication and critique
that were rapidly being closed as a consequence of the institutionalization and
growing elitism of African American studies as a discipline. To appreciate the
magnitude of this shift, it is important to understand the fact that African
American studies (or Black studies as it was originally termed) began as part of
the larger Black liberation struggle. The early advocates of Black studies
couched their call for the establishment of Black studies centers and programs
as part and parcel of a larger drive for community-based struggles and empowerment. In the postcivil rights era, a second generation of scholars emerged
who were delinked from these activist struggles and the Black power movement
as a whole. Indeed, Gatess own scholarship can be seen within the context of
this shift, as he was central to the move to make the study of African American
literature a more self-consciously theoretical rather than social activist enterprise. The seminar Afro-American Literature and Course Design held at Yale
University in June 1977 was a pivotal moment wherein the pedagogy and
research in the field were significantly transformed. Gates was a major participant and contributor to this effort to reformulate the study of African American letters, and by implication African American culture, away from seeing
race as a material object or an event (Gates, 1978, p. 67). This pedagogical
and theoretical shift had, as its concomitant, the emergence of a core group of
intellectuals who cultivated academic careers rooted in the struggle for tenure
and promotion and, thus, felt less of a need to speak to the broader spectrum of
African Americans or orient their work toward social transformation. As a
result, the field became far less open to educated lay people and, some have
argued, to scholars working in historically Black colleges and universities. As
Alkalimat (2000) explained,
An elite runs Black Studies, usually in a very undemocratic manner. Small handfuls of people tend to dominate the activities of each ideological network. This
means we see the same names in texts, anthologies, journals, academic programs,
professional organization, invitational conferences as well as annual meetings,
and as editors of reprints. This is a vertical structure, a hierarchy. It protects the
ideology by sustaining an authoritative source, and creates a more manageable
market through name recognition.
According to Adolph Reed (1997), Gatess conservative political position reflects an

equally conservative academic project of authenticating an autonomously Black
intellectual tradition and literary canon but one that is cleansed of its association
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with nonacademic political agendas and ideological programs (p. 144). Driven by
the modernist sublimation of literature and literacy and the postmodernist tendency to subsume all texts, including political texts, into literary texts,
Gates is able to construe literary studies as a self-contained, a-historical enterprise impelled by formalist aestheticism. Yet he can simultaneously appropriate
for that endeavor the cachet and sense of moral urgency that have legitimized
Afro-Americanist scholarly pursuits purporting to bear more directly on secular
politics and social affairs. (p. 144)
The cyber-debate that occurred in the wake of Wonders, therefore, represented a return to the earlier model of Black studies, which was informed and
sustained by debate within and among community members (albeit the more
educated strata). The H-Afro-Am listserv, where a significant proportion of the
debate ensued, originated at the University of Toledo, a working-class-based
urban public university, which has pioneered the field of eBlack studies. The
University of Toledo, unlike a Harvard or Yale, cannot boast of having a worldfamous roster of academics or a particularly well-resourced research center.
Nevertheless, the university has been able to pioneer a number of projects,
including a distance learning project linking scholars in Africa and the diaspora
and a digitized archival project devoted to the life and writings of Malcolm X.
The latter project has been particularly important because African American
studies have historically been linked to specific institutions whose archives
housed the writings and papers of particular Black intellectuals. This was and is
a very expensive enterprise, which requires the support of donors such as the
Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Ford Foundations. These ruling-class institutions
have been loathe to support the preservation of the radical Black tradition, and
thus, the speeches and writings of Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther
King are well archived and accessible to scholars, whereas those of Malcolm X
and Frantz Fanon are not. Furthermore, no major Black woman thinker has a
research archive specifically devoted to her work. The University of Toledo also
sponsors the Black Radical Congress listserv, which brings together thousands
of activists in the effort of bridging divides and reinvigorating the Black activist
tradition.
Although these developments are quite encouraging, it is important, however, to remain cognizant of the fact that the local geography of cyberspace follows the lines and contours of American racism, sexism, and classism
(Lockard, n.d.). In other words, despite the highly vaunted potential of the
Internet to allow individuals to escape the confines of embodied racial subjectivity, the inherent anonymity of the medium also makes it possible to completely and utterly disappear people of color (Tal, 1996). The reason that we
have yet to achieve the racial cyber-utopia that so many pundits predicted is
that Internet use, as a social practice, is embedded in other types of social practices and social relations. In other words, the current explosion of information
technology is class based. Key demographic variables such as income, race, and
socioeconomic status strongly condition Internet use. A number of studies
have shown that Whites are significantly more likely than African Americans to
have access to computers both at home and at work and, thus, are more likely to
use the Internet (Hoffman & Novak, 1998; Katz & Aspden, 1996;
McConnaughey & Lader, 1998). The Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies (2000)1 indicated that the gap in reported Internet usage between African Americans and other groups widened by nearly 50% between 1998 and
1999. They also found, however, that Internet use increased as home income
increased. Thus, whereas only 11% of African Americans with household
incomes less than $15,000 reported they used the Internet either at home or at
work, 66% of those with incomes between $60,000 and $90,000 used it. The
racial gap in Internet usage between poor households was 23%, whereas
between wealthier households it was only 4 percentage points. Furthermore,
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that among the
wealthiest Americans (income greater than $90,000), African Americans were
slightly more likely to use the Internet than Whites.
Thus, the unusually powerful impact that cyber-democracy had on the
evolution of the debate over Wonders can partially be explained by the fact that
most universities and colleges (even community colleges) are able to provide
their students and professors with some form of Internet access. Thus, scholars
who ordinarily would have been prevented from weighing in on the debate in
traditional ways, that is, through a conference presentation or a traditional
journal article, due to financial or time constraints, were still able to participate
and make their opinions known. Indeed, Gates was forced to publicly answer
his critics on the Web pages of West Africa Review, a fledgling Web-based African studies journal that devoted its second issue to debating the series. Had
West Africa Review been a traditional print-based journal with the usual time
lag of 6 months to a year to publication, Gates could have safely chosen to
ignore it and the debate that took place on its pages. To the extent that current
trends in Internet usage continue, with the digital divide shrinking rapidly
both among young people, particularly students (Sax, Astin, Korn, &
Mahoney, 1998), and individuals in the upper income brackets, we can expect
future debates among and between the African American intelligentsia to have
the open quality of the Wonders debate. Whether poor and working-class African Americans will be equal participants in this debate, however, remains to be
seen. As Gates (1999a) himself noted in his New York Times op-ed piece One
Internet, Two Nations,
The Internet is the 21st centurys talking drum, the very kind of grass-roots communication tool that has been such a powerful source of education and culture
for our people since slavery. But this talking drum we have not yet learned to
play. Unless we master the new information technology to build and deepen the
forms of social connection that a tragic history has eroded, African-Americans
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will face a form of cyber-segregation in the next century as devastating to our

aspirations as Jim Crow segregation was to those of our ancestors.
Gates, however, unlike the majority of sociologists and economists who have
studied the digital divide, concluded that it was not a function of the combined
impact of racism and classism in American society. Rather, he concluded that
the causes of poverty are both behavioral and structural, and therefore, if
African Americans failed to participate in the digital revolution, the fault will
be our own. His sociological analyses of the digital divide are in keeping with
his larger views on the impact of structure versus agency in the African American community. It is his stance on these issues, even more than his experiments
in literary theory or his discourses on Africa, that have merited him and other
Black public intellectuals such a controversial position in American society. I
will turn to a discussion of these issues in the next section.
Public Intellectuals, Private Agendas: Race,
the Academy, and Knowledge Production
Many things can be (and have been) said about Henry Louis Gates Jr. He has
been called arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, a flawed genius, a race leader, a
race traitor, and the intellectual heir of both W. E. B. DuBois and his arch nemesis Booker T. Washington. The lone thing he has never been accused of, however, is being stupid. Supporters and detractors alike agree that Skipas he is
sometimes calledis brilliant. Some have even called him a genius. A summa
cum laude graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Cambridge, the recipient of a
prestigious MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant at the age of 30, and winner of the National Humanities medal, he has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke,
and Harvard. He has also authored more than 10 books and is affiliated with a
number of esteemed organizations, including the Mellon Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Commission for the Preservation of
Black Culture. Clearly, Professor Gates is, by any standards, a highly intelligent
and capable man. This being the case, we must ask ourselves why he chose to
risk his academic reputation by making a series that even his strongest supporters agreed was not terribly sophisticated intellectually. It certainly was not for
lack of resourcesGates had the backing of a number of well-endowed foundations as well as Harvard and PBS. Nor was it for lack of access. His status as a
Harvard professor afforded Gates carte blanche entry into places that ordinary
academics could only dream of. Indeed, his list of advisors and consultants to
the series is both long and impressive. Furthermore, Gates is no novice when it
comes to large-scale and wide-ranging projects. He almost single handedly
engineered the reconstruction of African American studies at Harvard and significantly changed the scope and profile of the discipline in the process. In
partnership with Microsoft, he produced a pan-African encyclopedia and companion CD-ROM. Wonders is actually his second foray into documentary film
making on Africa. His first such venture was titled Railway Journeys Through
Africa and appeared on PBS in 1998. Thus, although no scholar is infallible
and even the sharpest academic minds occasionally produce work of uneven
quality, I am hard pressed to excuse Wonders as simply an unfortunate lapse in
academic judgment or an indication that Gates has finally bitten off more than
he could chew intellectually. His past and present achievements suggest to me,
rather, that any failures in the series were deliberately engineered.
Indeed, the online commentary about the series demonstrates that relatively
few people accepted Gatess lack of expertise as an alibi for the superficiality of
the series. As Molefi Asante remarked, I believe had he wanted to do better,
Henry Louis Gates could have, and the thought that he did not want to do
better haunts me. Asante was by no means the only person to surmise that
Gates had a hidden agenda. Yet another H-Africa participant argued, I would
not accuse him of not knowing what he was doing. He had a specific, may I say,
ideological objective in doing this program and he knew what he was doing or
wanted his program to achieve (H-Africa@H.Net.MSU.edu, November 2,
1999).
A number of participants in various listserv discussions have speculated that
Gatess wealthy backers were able to unduly influence the series ideological
agenda. One participant on H-Africa characterized Gates as an intellectual
entrepreneur, more interested in serving a hidden agenda of his sponsors than
advancing scholarship (November 5, 1999). Writing in a more sympathetic
vein, another contributor lamented that
the most depressing conclusion from this whole episode is that even a Harvard
chair and a famous name are small potatoes against the power of the public TV
network and its corporate/political sponsors. Reproaching Gates for the failings
and distortions of the series would be like reproaching Bill Robinson for the caricature of the Shirley Temple movies: the outrage is warranted but the target is ill
chosen. (H-Afro-Am@H.Net, November 1, 1999)
Although the politics of public television and issues of the possible uses and
misuses of editorial power are valid concerns that should not be dismissed,
when Wonders is viewed against Gatess larger corpus of workparticularly his
editorial pieces and books written for popular consumption such as Colored
People: A Memoir (Gates, 1994)it appears that very little separates Gatess
intellectual agenda from that of the corporate/foundation complex that
funds and helps to disseminate his research. Thus, absolving Gates of responsibility for the composition, contents, messages, and meanings of the series on
the grounds that he had little editorial control, or because of compromises
required by the film medium, is not convincing. Indeed, the images of Africa
and African Americans presented in the video and Gatess status as a Black
Public Intellectual are deeply implicated. Because Gates has been called the
chief interpreter of the black experience for white America and the most
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influential black man in the United States today who brought money and
glamour to the countrys great racial debate, we cannot separate the ways in
which he has been positioned in the academy and in public race discourses
from the implicit messages of the series (Bentsen, 1998, p. 66). Gatess detractors, especially among African American intellectuals, have long attributed his
celebrity less to the profundity of his scholarship and more to his conservative
politics. Although Gates has had a long and distinguished career as a professor
of English and literary critic, the work he has produced for nonacademic audiences (particularly The New York Times and The New Yorker) and his cozy relationship with powerful foundations have been the catalysts for his initial entry
into and current prominence in the elite class of so-called Black public intellectuals. Indeed, Gatess reputation as a Black public intellectual was a lightning
rod in the debate. As one writer to H-Afro-Am remarked, Gates is perhaps the
epitome of the term public intellectual. He is the major medias darling on all
things African because his Eurocentric perspective is comfortably understood
by white audiences (H-Afro-AM@H.Net.MSU.edu, December 19, 1999).
The notion of a Black public intellectual is of course not new. Harold Cruse
(1967) wrote a definitive genealogy and critique of them as a class more than
three decades ago. However, it was only following a series of lengthy articles in
1995 in The New Yorker (January 9, 1995), the New Republic (March 6, 1995),
Village Voice (April 11, 1995), Atlantic Monthly (Boynton, 1995), Boston
Review (Summer, 1995), not to mention the Los Angeles Times and The New
York Review of Books, that the term became firmly entrenched in the mainstream American vernacular. Despite the fact that the term was constantly bandied about in both the academic and popular press, and that there was general
agreement as to who counted as one and who didnt, much about the term
remained vague and undefined. Who, for example, counted as the public of
these intellectuals? What constituencies did they speak to and for? At whose
behest?
Adolph Reed provided a strongly worded critic of Black public intellectuals
in an opinion piece for the Village Voice in 1995. Reeds acerbic critique
attracted much attention and debate, perhaps because Reed himself is Black
and seen as an aspiring public intellectual, although that is a term he would not
apply to himself. Stripped of the essays venom, his essential argument was that
the Black public intellectuals were anointed by Whites to write social commentary about Black life, to explain the mysteries of Black America, and to interpret the opaquely black heart of darkness for whites (Reed, 2000, p. 77).
Despite their political posturing as leftists or liberals, he sees them as descendants of Booker T. Washingtons conservatism and accommodationist politicsa club of backslapping individualists, averse to serious internal debate,
claiming Black authenticity, and speaking for the race.
An article about Michael Eric Dyson that appeared in the Chronicle of
Higher Education in January 1996 speaks volumes about popular perceptions
of what a good Black public intellectual is supposed to do and be. The title of
the article, Hip Hop Intellectual, demonstrates the degree to which these
scholars are prized for their ability to facilitate White scholars forays into what
is popularly understood as Black culture. The article is punctuated by references to Professor Dysons ability to both perform and analyze rap music, to
quote both Gramsci and Snoop Doggy Dogg, and to be at ease with both the
street and the academy (McMillen, 1996). Clearly, a high premium is placed
on the ability of these scholars to act as culture brokers between upper class
Whites and African American communities. The direction of the flow of
knowledge and whose culture is deemed in need of brokering are not difficult
to surmise. They are generally lauded for their ability to mediate, represent,
and deliver the African American perspective to White audiences. Their work
regularly appears in upmarket publications such as The New Yorker, The New
York Times, Harpers, and Atlantic Monthly, whereas rarely, if ever, gracing the
pages of popular African American publications such as Ebony, Essence, and
Emerge. Paradoxically, their authority to speak on the behalf of African Americans derives largely from the fact that they bear credentials from and are supported by prestigious White institutions. Most maintain little, if any, significant intellectual engagement with historically Black institutions such as
Spelman, Hampton, or Morehouse. Although some, such as Dyson, come from
poor or working-class backgrounds and profess a commitment to activism, few
are significantly engaged with grassroots political struggles. Their high levels of
compensation help them to disengage geographically and politically from the
communities they claim to represent.
The Black public intellectuals, of course, do not think of themselves as
commodified intellectual performers providing entertainment for White privileged consumers or as serving as public relations intermediaries and race managers interpreting Blackness for centrist and consensus politics. They prefer to
think of themselves as grandchildren of the DuBois intellectual elite, the
Talented Tenth who have, as Gates and West (1996) declared in their book
The Future of the Race, responsibilities . . . to the larger African-American community, past, present and future (p. vii). Claiming a progressive agenda, they
contended that
it is only by confronting the twin realities of white racism, on the one hand, and
our own failures to seize initiative and break the cycle of poverty, on the other,
that we, the remnants of the Talented Tenth, will be able to assume a renewed
leadership role for, and within, the black community. (p. vii)
They contended that

to continue to repeat the same old stale formulas, to blame the man for oppressing us all, in exactly the same ways; to scapegoat Koreans, Jews, women, or even
black immigrants for the failure of African Americans to seize local entrepreneurial opportunities, is to neglect our duty as leaders of our community. (p. xv)
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However, their continued practice of representing African Americans, despite

their lack of practical engagement, means that these public intellectuals are
often little more than highly paid ventriloquists. Ironically, Dysons description of the manner in which rap music is deployed in contemporary culture
could apply equally well to the scholarship of his Black public intellectual contemporaries. Noting the enthusiasm for rap music among White suburban
teenagers, Dyson (1996) attributed its popularity to the fact that it makes voyeuristic whites . . . think theyre getting a slice of authentic ghetto life when in
reality theyre being served colorful exaggerations (p. 180).
Indeed, voyeurism is a critical aspect of any type of racial ventriloquism.
In Wonders, for example, Gates is particularly adept at soliciting the gaze of the
White voyeur while allowing him or her to disavow the status as voyeur and the
pleasures derived therefrom. The most disturbing instance of this particular
variety of racial ventriloquism/voyeurism occurs in Episode 2, The Swahili
Coast. The purpose of the segment is, ostensibly, to explore constructions of
racial identity among East Africans. In actuality, the video quickly degenerates
into Gates alternately ridiculing and berating African people who identify as
Arab or Persian. The camera pans the faces and bodies of individuals who Gates
knows will readily be identified by American audiences as Black while he
demands to know from various informants why they identify as Persian or Arab
rather than African or Black. One of the most infuriating moments of the
entire 6-hour series occurs when Gates, functioning as the omniscient narrator,
dismisses the right of East Africans to claim Persian ancestry based on their distant ancestors. He delegitimates their understanding of their own genealogies
based on the fact that he could not and would not claim Irish ancestry based on
the identity of one of his distant ancestors. In a single stroke, Gates abstracts
Americas racial categories from more than two centuries of racial violence,
slavery, and oppression. He renders American racial categories transhistorical,
apolitical, objectively logical, and correct by definition as he simultaneously reaffirms long-standing notions about the inability of Africans to
properly reason about anything, least of all their own experiences.
Indeed, the ways in which Gates engaged the issue of African involvement in
the slave trade and racial identity in East Africa led many to speculate that
Gatess intent was not to explore the richness of Africas historical legacy but to
delegitimize the continued struggles by African Americans against Americas
racist legacy, past and future. Molefi Asante charged,
The themes covered in the series rest on some disturbing sub-texts, such as, the
undermining of a pan-African sentiment, the reinforcement of negative stereotypes . . . and the undermining of the movement for African reparations. I see this
series as a clear assault on the African and African-American narrative of liberation.
Another, more insidious, technique Gates employs is to enact an elaborate

performance of an authentic racial culture, put on for the benefit of the voy-
eur, that appears not to take notice of his or her presence. Examples of the latter
variety of racial ventriloquism/voyeurism also abound. They include Gatess
repeated use of the word brother when addressing various African people and
his angry exchanges with his West African and East African forebears for having sold his great-great-great-grandparents into slavery. A particularly glaring
instance of this occurs in the final episode of the series, Lost Cities of the
South. The segment is shot in such a way that it appears we are witnessing a
private and spontaneous conversation between two friends, Gates and a young
South African man. The South African man, despite never having left South
Africa, speaks with an extremely practiced American accent and professes a
very strong desire to be an African American. The ultimate effect of Gatess
exchange with the young man is to completely abstract his comments from the
relevant political and social context and demonstrate to American audiences
that Black South Africans want nothing more than to be African Americans.
The subtext governing this exchange and its implicit message is obvious,
mainly that South African Blacks clearly realize what White Americans have
been attempting to tell African Americans for centuriesthat despite the
indignities they face, they should feel lucky to have been saved from the
indignities of life in Africa (Richburg, 1997).
Africanist Versus Afro-Americanist Perspectives:
What They Did and Did Not Say
Because I have focused as much on what was said about the series as on the
series itself, it is fitting that I conclude with a discussion about the primary discussantsthe participants on H-Afro-Am and H-Africa. Although there was a
considerable degree of overlap in terms of what particular aspects of the Gates
series provoked heated discussion and debate, there were also key areas where
the H-Afro-Am list engaged in lively discussion and debate, whereas the participants on H-Africa remained eerily quiet. The first of these was the issue of possible Jewish involvement in the slave trade. The second was that of female circumcision. The former discussion was precipitated by a comment made by Ali
Mazrui to the effect that Gates focused on an African ethnic group, the
Ashanti, as guilty collaborators in the trans-Atlantic slave trade while never
mentioning specific European ethnic groupsin particular Jewish peopleas
also having collaborated. Reflecting on the storm of controversy that ensued
from Jewish academics and leaders when scholars such as Tony Martin and
Leonard Jeffreys suggested that Jewish capital played a special role in slavery,
Mazrui speculated whether the Ashanti or their descendents would make Gates
pay a price for having singled them out in discussion about slavery.
Given the complexities of African AmericanJewish relations and concerns
about Black anti-Semitism, a controversy in which Gates has played a crucial
role, it is perhaps not surprising that commentators would seize on Mazruis
reference to Jewish capital and Leonard Jeffreys. More interesting is the fact
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that the debate about Jewish involvement in the slave trade was largely concentrated on the H-Afro-Am discussion list. When one scholar broached the question of Jewish involvement on the H-Africa list, it elicited little response. He
quoted Mazruis statement and asked whether Mazruis defense of Jeffries
could be construed as less a defense than an unwarranted attack (H-Africa@
H.Net.MSU.edu, November 4, 1999)? The three immediate responses offered
mostly reference materials. One writer observed that
read one way, and particularly in connection with Leonard Jeffreys, it [Mazruis
statement] seems to have anti-Jewish overtones and to lend credence to antiJewish abuses of history in some quarters of U.S. intellectual life. However,
Mazrui might also be read to raise questions about the legitimacy of a) collective
responsibility of ethnic groups and b) singling out any particular group in what
was a huge, complex process for whom many parties of many identities bore
responsibility. (H-Africa@H.Net.MSU.edu, November 5, 1999)
In contrast to the rather limited and restrained discussion on H-Africa, the

reactions on the H-Afro-Am list were more numerous and vociferous. Even
people who claimed not to have seen the actual series reproached Mazrui. One
commentator wondered what Mazruis agenda was because, in his opinion,
Jewish participation in the slave trade was about as central to that trade as
African-Americans who owned other enslaved African-Americans were to slavery in the United States (November 2, 1999). Another declared that I didnt
see this episode, but this comment sounds a bit anti-Semitic to me, esp. since
no other groups are mentioned (November 1, 1999).
There were, of course, a few commentators on the H-Afro-Am list who
defended Mazruis overall comments by trying to put them in a larger context.
One reader admonished,
Lets not get sidetracked by Mr. Mazruis comment about L. Jeffreys. The real
point of his comment had already been made: Gates does not adequately recognize the issues of POWER and MONEY. Yes, Africans participated willingly/
unwillingly. The point is that Gates overlooks the issue of power. (H-Afro-AM@
H.Net.MSU.edu, November 2, 1999)
Abdul Alkalimat, editor of H-Afro-Am, registered his concern that

the criticisms have shifted from Gates to Mazrui. I happened to agree with most
of Prof. Mazruis comments. I find it interesting how his mention of Jewish participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade has brought such swift reproach and determined refutations on the part of many members of this list. I hope that we are not
reacting emotionally to suggestions of Jewish participation in the Atlantic
Slave Trade. . . . Mazrui never states that Jews dominated or controlled the trade,
at least not in his message. His point seems to be about identifying particular participants by ethnicity and balancing the presentation by giving a breakdown of
other participants in the trade. (H-Afro-AM@H.Net.MSU.edu, November 2,
1999)
The apparent divergence in terms of the topics and focus of discussion

between the H-Afro-Am and H-Africa lists points to some of the differences in
the composition and discursive practices of the two fields. From the late 1940s
when African studies was wrested from the historically Black universities and
colleges and lodged in the historically White universities, its practitioners and
epistemic concerns changed. It became dominated by White scholars whose
work shifted from the cultural preoccupations of earlier Black scholars to policy prescriptions in a field now firmly tied to the cold war national security
agenda of American foreign policy (Guyer, 1996; Martin & West, 1999;
Zeleza, 1997). The transition in African studies from diaspora to development,
culture to economy, posing large civilizational questions to conducting empirical policy-oriented research, appropriately dressed in the theoretical flavor of
the month, accompanied by the endless fears of provoking charges of
Eurocentricism in a field dominated by Whites, might explain the reluctance of
Africanists to engage in contentious issues affecting the African diaspora in the
United States, such as Black-Jewish relations, and sensitive cultural questions
in Africa, such as female circumcision. For their part, the African Africanists,
ever so mindful of the cultural contempt in which things Africa are held, are
similarly reluctant to broach such topics.
Conversely, the cultural paradigm remains central in African American
studies in large measure because the field is centrally located in the maelstrom
of multiculturalism and its cultural wars, which has facilitated and been reinforced by the ascendancy of literary studies. Combined with the culturalist tradition of earlier African American scholarship on Africa, this might explain the
readiness to discuss such a controversial issue as female circumcision. The
salience of the Jewish question arises in the context of assaults on multiculturalism whose academic sites are to be found in so-called ethnic and minority studies and serves as a litmus test of racial tolerance for scholars coming from the
most racially abused population in the United States. The two discoursesthe
ability to question an African cultural practice and affirm another American
minority constructed as the bearers of universal racial tyrannyprovide crucial gestures of moderation to the academic establishment for a field created
out of African American political radicalism within and outside the academy in
the 1960s and 1970s and currently faced with renewed activism.
Conclusion: Afro- OrientalismThe Ever- Changing Same
In an insightful and highly damning critique of Gatess series, Ali Mazrui
(2000) suggested that it might signal the birth of a new paradigm, which he
characterized as black orientalism. In his highly disapproving response,
Biodun Jeyifo (2000) objected to Mazruis use of the term Orientalism, arguing
that it represented a misuse of both Saids text and the concepts deployed
therein: Mazrui ignores, deliberately in my opinion, the fact that Said makes it
abundantly clear that Orientalism was not, and could never have been, the
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creation of ONE man, of one DISCIPLINE, of one GENERATION of European Orientalists.

However, Jeyifos response misunderstands Mazruis intent in his deliberate
invoking of Orientalism, both as a text and as a form of sociopolitical practice. The brilliance of Orientalism lies in its skillful use of Foucaults insights
about the importance of ideological or discursive practices in not only defining how particular people and geographic locations are analyzed, observed, and
ultimately dominated but also how that process actually works to construct the
very object being spoken of. Thus, Said (1989) demonstrated that the Orient
is much like the mad man and the deviant that were not actually existing entities in the world that were simply described by discourse but, rather, were better
understood as effects of that discourse. Said artfully blended this Foucaultian
mode of analysis with a more orthodox Marxist analysis of the intersection
between ideology and material relations. Thus, Said looked specifically at how
colonialism and the project of rendering the Orient a space that existed solely
for the economic benefit of the West were and are deeply implicated in the discursive processes described above. He demonstrated, much like Marx did in
The German Ideology (Marx & Engels, 1970), the ways in which particular sets
of ideas united social classes from the inside and facilitated their attempts to
dominate society as a wholein other words, how ideas became a material
force in society.
The notion of Orientalism, therefore, can be put to extremely good use in
understanding the production of Wonders as a cultural and political text.
Clearly, no single text gives birth to Orientalist practice of any kindSaid
never intended the text as an origins story. However, it is quite possible to
locate Wonders as critical to an ongoing process of producing Africa as outside
of historya site of self-generated chaos. The ways in which the series authorizes particular understandings of race, racism, and exploitation cannot be
understood unless it is analyzed against the backdrop of what Leo Panitch
(1998) has described as the social democratization of globalization and the
attempts of Western capital to transform developing states (particularly those
in Africa) into transmission belts for a global capitalist agenda. As James
Mittleman (1999) argued, developing nations in general and African nations
in particular are increasingly being driven into poverty as their economic and
political structures are being forced to restructure to meet the demands of foreign capitala recolonization effort, as it were. These processes of economic
exploitation have (as they have always had) strong ideological components.
Therefore, as American and British capital seeks to disable and dismantle the
economic agency of African states via measures such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the
World Trade Organization, we are witnessing the proliferation of media and
other discourses that construct the African state in extremely negative ways.
The ways in which Gatess series ultimately sanctions locating the primary
responsibility for Africas problemshistorical and contemporarywith Afri-
cans themselves, while allowing the West to divest itself of that same responsibility, make it a preeminent example of Orientalist ideological practice.
What is novel about this particular practice, as Mazrui points out, is the fact
that it is enacted through a Black interlocutor, thus giving it a greater degree of
legitimacy and seemingly making it immune to charges of racism or Orientalism. The fact that this Black interlocutor is also African American is of profound significance, for it makes these texts available for use in constructing
African Americans in ways that make them, rather than institutionalized racism,
responsible for the increasingly marginalized status of the poor and workingclass majority. Constructing African Americans as people sold into slavery by
their own people, for example, works to absolve White Americans of any
responsibility for the material benefits that accrued and continue to accrue to
them as a result. Thus, the series must also be read and analyzed against the
backdrop of the current attacks on affirmative action, the rise of the prison
industrial complex, and increased tolerance for state-sponsored violence and
police brutality in Black communities. Thus, Black Orientalism represents the
latest attempt to, in the words of Lewis Gordon (1997), problematize black
people instead of responding to the social problems that black people experience (p. 65).
Although Foucaultian analysis provides a powerful analytic resource for
thinking about the construction of racist discourse, it must always be used
alongside Marxist theories of ideology because of the ways in which the latter
takes not only its task of exposing the relationship between social and thought
and domination but also the task of historical action against that domination.
Critical to Marxs project was an exploration of the processes whereby new
forms of consciousness and conceptions of the world arose that moved the
masses into historical action against the prevailing system. As Marx explained,
All forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism,
by resolution into self consciousness or transformation into apparitions,
spectres, fancies, etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social
relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other
types of theory. . . . It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men
make circumstances. (Marx & Engels, 1970, p. 53)
Therefore, it is important to look at Wonders, and the debate that occurred in

its wake, as providing an important point of entry into a larger and ultimately
more significant area of mutual concern: the concerted attempt to wage war
epistemic, economic, and culturalon people of African descent around the
globe. As Gordon (2000) explained, we are witnessing an attempt to construct
a world without blacks as a solution to the challenge of treating blacks with
moral respect (p. 119). Thus, our engagement with Wonders cannot stop at the
level of critiquing the series and its aims. We might get inspiration from
W. E. B. DuBois, in whose name Gates, unfortunately, enacts much of his aca-
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demic malevolence. As Gordon (2000) went on to explain, DuBois came to

the conclusion that the study of a problem was a necessary but insufficient
means of eliminating it. . . . DuBois became a revolutionary because, in the
end, he saw that knowledge by itself does not compel action (p. 94). Thus, our
efforts at critiquing the series will ultimately be meaningless if they are not coupled with far-reaching attempts to transform the social relations that not only
helped to give rise to the series but whose existence it ultimately celebrates and
promotes.
Note
1. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies 1998 and 1999 National
Opinion Polls on Internet Use for 1998 and 1999 are based on responses from telephone interviews with 1,606 adults conducted in September 1998. The same included
a national general population sample of 850 African Americans. The 1999 responses
are based on telephone interviews with 1,678 adults, a national general population
sample of 850 and a national sample of 900 African Americans. For both surveys, the
statistical margin of error is 3.5 percentage points.
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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

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Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies

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Call Me America: The Construction of

Keywords: race in cyberspace; race in film; African film; digital divide

Introduction: Call Me America

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