The Dictionary of Global Culture
Appiah, Kwame Anthony & Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
JThe Dictionary of Global Culture Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alfred A. Knopf 7i7 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Marc Carnegie I n 1990 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was called...
...You will not find Edmund Burke, the English language, or the Iron Curtain...
...Thus, in the entry on Hegel, the Afro-centric crank Leonard Jeffries is cited as one of the "contemporary figures" who "owe[s] significant debts to Hegel's works...
...was called as an expert witness in the obscenity trial of rappers 2 Live Crew...
...some broadening of their cultural horizons wouldn't be a bad thing...
...Many news stories cited the professor's testimony, but I don't recall a single one pointing out that Gates had given the jury a bum rap...
...But a Harvard professor...
...Just the opposite is true: the notion of a global culture has arisen precisely because our tradition has marched its way into almost every corner of the globe, divining pockets of culture and civilization that have thus far resisted the call of the West...
...Eliot, to my mind, is a better critic than poet anyway, and if you're going to stage an audacious attempt to clear the path for the next global civilization, you need to take some decent swings of the axe...
...Nobody needs to know this, nor does anybody need to know most of the trivia assembled in this slapdash volume...
...But this admixture of progressive politics ("Castro remains a charismatic personality") and feel-good aesthetics ("Charlie Parker was idolized by other musicians during his lifetime") isn't aimed at conservatives anyway...
...Gates and Appiah may pretend their Dictionary offers "what every American needs to know as we enter the next century," but what they are really peddling is old-fashioned race politics, garlanded with intellectual adornments like Gates and Appiah's Harvard imprimatur...
...Salvador Allende but not Francisco Franco...
...And you can't expect beat reporters to know one ancient bard from another...
...Granted, it wasn't a misstatement on the order of, "I was just eating a hamburger with Kato in the Bentley when I heard somebody scream...
...The Autobiography of Malcolm Xis a "masterpiece," while Richard III lacks "sophistication and agility of verse...
...Ho Chi Minh "was recognized for his contribution to Communism in Vietnam by the renaming of the city of Saigon...
...The idea is both predictable (the left always looks to the government to make good its claims) and wrong...
...We don't need to know about Malaysian folk art as much as Malaysian folk need to know about representative government...
...instead his spot on the roster went to Kwame Nkrumah...
...more global, it is essential for them to learn about William Shakespeare as they learn about Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Murasaki Shikibu from Japan, Rabindranath Tagore from India...
...If only Nixon had led the way, he might have made the cut himself...
...The entries themselves are likewise a hodgepodge of the anodyne and the preposterous...
...Shakespeare trumps Maya Angelou, not because Albert Shanker says he should, but because his poetry is simply far superior...
...president Richard Nixon...
...Surely the greatest works in the canon can withstand the attack...
...we ought to prepare ourselves for the beginning of a global civilization...
...then, as now, the line he quoted came from Scottish poet Robert Burns...
...The American Spectator ?February 1997 71...
...you're in clover, however, on Rigoberta Menchii, Hausa (the native tongue of Niger), and the Great Leap Forward ("dramatic consequences" ensued...
...protest songs but not Protestantism...
...DuBois Institute, publishes books as often as some academics do their laundry, and stands as one of the most prominent spokesmen in a movement to revise the nation's college curricula so that blacks will feel better about themselves and what they don't know...
...It would be even nicer if our English professors knew their English poets...
...Then, as now, Gates was a professor with a doctorate in English literature...
...Well, fair play to them...
...At least one real Communist in government, though—Chairman Mao—"developed closer ties with the West by meeting U.S...
...in their desperation to illustrate the important contributions of black Americans, the editors even mention Duke Ellington's "sixteen honorary doctorates...
...His "political paranoia" led to a "failure to discover any Communists in the government...
...Above all its target audience is the most upwardly mobile among America's black middle class, who, in order to have their insecurities assuaged, have more to lose than just their $35 per copy...
...Then again, Henry Louis Gates is no ordinary Cambridge don: he holds a dual appointment in English and Afro-American studies, pens regular profiles for the New Yorker, runs the W.E.B...
...That the "new generations" will learn as much about Soyinka as they do about Shakespeare (read the above sentence again carefully) does not bode well for the dead white males...
...Like their multicultural brethren, Gates and Appiah maintain the conceit that we need to learn about other cultures because the world is "becoming more global," as if the the Maori and the Xhosa and the Zulu had changed the course of recorded history and become relevant to our society...
...Still, attempts to re-evaluate the Western canon irk many conservatives, although as Christopher Hitchens (among others) has noted, those most vexed by this kind of enterprise couldn't quote you a line of Shakespeare themselves...
...This is pretty thin gruel with which to nourish future generations, though not the thinnest...
...Kremlin is here, but not parliament...
...As for T. S. Eliot's modernist epic The Waste Land, it is properly under70 February 1997 • The American Spectator stood as "the white man's ballad of sexual frustration...
...Any encyclopedia betrays the limitations and prejudices of its age, of course, and Gates's Dictionary is the kind of enterprise that would give Allan Bloom fits, if Bloom weren't already a dead white male himself...
...We think," they declare, "that in preparing new generations for a culture that is MARC CARNEGIE is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Alice Walker's works, meanwhile, are44 Part of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, after all, is that he has outlasted centuries of inferior competition...
...Delicately explaining to the court the difference between mere vulgarity and a double entendre, he offered as an example "Shakespeare's 'My love is like a red, red rose...
...Not that Gates would ever describe his agenda so modestly: as he (and co-editor K. Anthony Appiah) put it in the introduction to The Dictionary ofGlobal Culture, their goal is rather more ambitious...
...important in their own right, for helping to "create the emerging market of black women readers for black books in the 1970's and 1980's...
...Sure, it would be nice if the man on the street knew a little Mongo Beti, "one of the best known" of the Cameroonian writers...
...But Joseph McCarthy...
...Part of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, after all, is that he has outlasted centuries of inferior competition, from Beaumont and Fletcher to j. M. Synge to Amiri Baraka...
...Opponents of the traditional Western canon tend to overestimate the importance of official sanction, as if it were the bureaucratic hacks at the NEA who determined whether or not the Bard's work survives...
...Those prejudices are unsurprisingly blatant throughout this volume's boo-odd pages, and anyone who has read a Hilton Kramer column within the past five years could predict its contents...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
