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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2815
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 05:40 pm: | 
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(The "kicker" in this story is the last few sentences. Still not sure if this is a typo or something. I hope it is a typo or copyediting mistake. But if it is not...)
In Search of Max Faber
By Scott McLemee
In 1997, Oxford University Press published Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture,” by Michael Eric Dyson, who at that point was a professor of communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has since gone on to bigger things; last summer, Dyson was named by Georgetown University as one of its University Professors. God and Gangsta arrived bearing glowing endorsements, including one by Houston A. Baker Jr., a former president of the Modern Language Association....
In his new book, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press), Baker recalls being stirred by his “hope for the black intellectual future to produce a supportive blurb invoking comparisons of Dyson with geniuses of times past. ”This, Baker now says, was “a grievous mistake"....
Either way, it seems that Baker has now carefully read what he once so hastily blurbed, and found it wanting. “Dyson’s black public intellectual mode,” he says, “is a Sugar Ray Robinson-style duck and cover strategy. It intermixes metaphors, and dodges and skips evasively with the light drama of nonce formulations. There are no intellectual knockouts. Further, there is virtually no irony whatsoever.” About a subsequent work, Baker says that the main factor “at work in Dyson’s text — especially when he devotes lavish textual space to his own public appearances on ‘Meet the Press’ — is authorial self-promotion.... This is the stuff of tabloid journalism. It is not worthy work for a true black public intellectual.”
A complex set of transactions is under way among those three adjectives, even beyond their relationship with the noun they qualify. Some black public intellectuals, it seems, aren’t truly intellectuals. And other black public intellectuals aren’t truly black.The whole domain must be policed by someone who manifests all three qualities in perfect harmony. Said gatekeeper must be willing and able to represent what the author calls “the black majority.” For the true black public intellectual, the interests, intentions, and aspirations of his community prove wonderfully apodictic. Guess who qualifies?
...Baker assures readers that he, at least, is using the best tools available to the true black public intellectual. “I am,” Baker assures us, “a confident, certified, and practiced reader of textual argument, implicit textual values and implications, and the ever-varying significations of written words in their multiple contexts of reception.... I forgo ad hominem sensationalism, generalized condemnation, and scintillating innuendo where black neoconservatives and centrists are concerned. The following pages represent a rigorous, scholarly reading practice seasoned with wit.”
After reading some two hundred pages of “ad hominem sensationalism, generalized condemnation, and scintillating innuendo,” one wonders if this passage, at least, may be a case of the “irony” that one of the blurbs for Betrayal attributes to it. I am not quite sure. But one moment of reading the book certainly had a profound effect on my grasp of just how seriously the book must be taken. This was when Baker discusses the affinity of certain contemporary black public intellectuals (the non-true kind) for neoconservatism.
Baker points out that in the 1940s, Irving Kristol, the founding father of that neoconservatism, abandoned the constricted world of left-wing politics “in search of a more expansive field of intellectual and associational commerce (one in which he would be ‘permitted’ to read Max Faber)....”
That parenthetical reference stopped me cold. I have a certain familiarity with the history of Kristol and his cohort, but somehow the role of Max Faber in their bildung had escaped my notice. Indeed, the name itself was totally unfamiliar. And having been informed that this book was “the product of “a rigorous, scholarly reading practice” — one “seasoned with wit,” mind you, and published by Columbia University Press — I felt quite embarrassed by this gap in my knowledge.
Off to the library, then, to unearth the works of Max Faber! And then the little light bulb went off. Baker (who assures us that he is a capable judge of social-scientific discussions of African-American life) was actually referring to Max Weber.
It’s a good thing the author of this book is “a confident, certified, and practiced reader of textual argument, implicit textual values and implications, and the ever-varying significations of written words in their multiple contexts of reception.” Otherwise one would have to feel embarrassed for him, and for the press that published it. And not just for its copy editors, by any means.
http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/09/mclemee
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12031
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 07:30 pm: |
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I got the idea that the author of this article, Scott Mcleme, was implying that Houston A. Baker, who was criticizing black intellectuals was, himself, inept, because he got the names mixed up and couldn't even attribute his reseach to the right person!
Having said that, however, I must admit that I do find Michael Eric Dyson and all of his glib verbal pyro-techics, more about style than substance, and I also agree that he is someone who is certainly more proficient at promoting himself than at saying anything profound. |
Arioso_hum
Regular Poster
Username: Arioso_hum
Post Number: 44
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 08:36 am: |
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Cynique!! I recently saw him (Dyson) on Tavis Smiley and I said the same thing about him almost to the letter (I got a witness).
But alas, like most pyrotechnix...they are purdy to watch but can get loud and annoying at times.
Rondall |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 3076
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 06:04 pm: |
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"....I must admit that I do find Michael Eric Dyson and all of his glib verbal pyro-techics, more about style than substance, and I also agree that he is someone who is certainly more proficient at promoting himself than at saying anything profound."
 ......Thank you. Every time I hear Dyson, I’m always tempted to check my back pocket to make sure my wallet is still there. His annoying 2000 word per minute rambles remind me of a hyped race hustler on speed and meth.
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Ferociouskitty
Veteran Poster
Username: Ferociouskitty
Post Number: 169
Registered: 02-2008
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, April 11, 2008 - 06:49 pm: |
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I picked up Dyson's "Why I Love Black Women" in a bookstore once. Why was it more about him than black women????
Do I really need to know that the lovely Freda Payne freak-danced up on him once at a cookout???
And his embrace/defense of hip-hop/gangsta rap is suspect to me.
Finally, his wife has looked miserable in every pic I've ever seen, and that speaks volumes.
/end rant ;-) |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 3077
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 03:40 am: |
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"I picked up Dyson's "Why I Love Black Women" in a bookstore once. Why was it more about him than black women????"
Because that's the way he is. Nothing new about it.
"Do I really need to know that the lovely Freda Payne freak-danced up on him once at a cookout???"
No. Like the rest of us, we have no interest nor need to know about his personal conquests or hyped encounters with women. But this is clearly symptomatic of a sad bloated ego.
"And his embrace/defense of hip-hop/gangsta rap is suspect to me."
It's pathetic to me. It's one of the many reasons I have no use for the man. I can't get on board with his pathetic and offensive defense of these modern day Bert Williams in "black face" race traitors and minstrelsy buffoons.
"Finally, his wife has looked miserable in every pic I've ever seen, and that speaks volumes."
With a character like him, I'm not surprised.......
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6973
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 3 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 06:28 pm: |
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He-he! I always wondered how long it was gonna take for brother Dyson to embarrass too many uppity Black folks. Gottta say the brotha has got some stamina. (Hang in there brotha. Them uppity bastards about to burn themselves out, and real niggaz never die!)
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12045
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 4 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 12, 2008 - 09:49 pm: |
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The only person Dyson embarasses is himself because once people see through the subtefuge of his verbosity and discover how he uses words to dazzle rather than define, then he comes across as the hot air specialist that he is. "Uppity" people are actually the kind of people he appeals to because they are the type who erroneously think that plain spokeness is a sign of simple-mindedness, and are more impressed with vapid eloquence. IMO Dyson is an pseudo-intellectual con-man. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2824
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008 - 10:21 am: |
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Dr. Dyson can be, for me, rather...challenging to listen to for any length of time. What he and others (including Baker, IMO) are doing, though, is in no way confined to African American scholars. There is a fine line between maintaining your excellence and respect within your discipline and being successful and relevant in publicizing your field for mass audiences. Not very many can do this successfully. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 12079
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008 - 05:31 pm: |
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Yep, the famous white conservative "intellectual" William F. Buckley was someone who engaged in a lot of verbal hi-jinks and self-promotion. It's not inconceivable that egocentricism and intellectuallism often go hand in hand.  |
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