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Black Lives: Essays in African American Biography, edited by James L. Conyers, Jr. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1999. 222 pp. $19.95, paper.
Reviewed by Irene E. McHenry, Fielding Graduate Institute and Friends Council on Education.
Black Lives is a vivid, varied and remarkable collection of 15 scholars' work, which individually and collectively makes a significant contribution to studies in African American history, culture, and literature. This collection strengthens the legacy of African American biography by providing fresh perspectives on the global impact of the Black experience and significantly adds to the literature on the contributions from the Black community in America. Edited by James Conyers, Jr. and devoted to the study of African American biography and culture from an Afrocentric perspective, this richly diverse collection evidences Conyers' scholarly background as an educator, researcher, and author of considerable works in African American history and sociology.
The manuscripts in Black Lives are arranged in three broad categories: intellectual studies; literary studies, grouped as cultural biography; and, oral history narratives and the use of biography as a teaching tool. This three-part organization provides the reader with common themes for the otherwise diverse methods, theories, cultures of inquiry, and writing styles used by the 15 authors in conducting and writing biographical studies. Individually, each essay is a unique discourse, which examines and amplifies the critical and substantial contributions of African American lived experience within the context of world history and culture. Collectively, the essays provide a view of the diversity and complexity of the African diaspora examined by African American scholars.
Conyers authors the lead essay in the collection, introducing the section on intellectual biography with a focus on the life and work of Maulana Karenga (1941- ), one of the leading Afrocentric thinkers in the 20" century. Conyers examines the genre of Black biography and addresses the issue of the hegemony of the Eurocentric perspective in writing biography while inviting the reader into a contextual analysis of Karenga's philosophical...