An essential reconsideration of black literature and culture and its response to modernity. In the African-American encounter with modernism, all was not confrontation. Rather, as Edward M. Pavlic demonstrates here, African-American artists negotiated the intersection of high modernism in Europe and American discourse to fashion their own distinctive response to American modernity. A deft repositioning of black literature and culture, Pavli´c's book reenvisions the potentials and dilemmas where the different traditions of modernism meet and firmly establishes African-American modernism at this cultural crossroads. Offering new insights into the work of a variety of African-American artists-including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Robert Hayden, David Bradley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Romare Bearden, and John Coltrane-Pavlic explores the complex ways in which key modernist philosophical ideas and creative techniques have informed black culture. Crossroads Modernism also provides an in-depth look at how West African cultural legacies are brought to bear in the structure of a truly African-American modernist creative process. The book brings to light two interrelated strains of black modernism: Afro-Modernism, which employs established modernist concerns and conceits to illuminate internal and psychological experience; and Diasporic Modernism, which places greater emphasis on shared cultural space and builds on traditions rooted in West African cultures. Whereas much has been said about the (generally racist) use of "blackness" in constituting modernism, Crossroads Modernism is the first book to expose the key role that modernism has played in the constitution of "blackness" in African-American aesthetics. In light of this work, canonical texts in African-American literature can no longer be read as devoid of their own singular contribution to international modernism. Edward M. Pavlic is assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Union College in Schenectady, New York. His book of poems, Paraph of Bone and Other Kinds of Blue (2001) was selected by Adrienne Rich for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.

There has never been any doubt that the Adams family was America’s first family in our politics and memory. This research-based and insightful book is a multigenerational biography of that family from the founder father John through the mordant writer Brooks.

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, software developers, and “visionary” tech writers even imagine an AI that will equal or surpass human intelligence, adding to a sense of technological determinism where humanity is inexorably shaped by powerful new machines. But among the hundreds of essays, books, and movies that approach the question of AI, few have asked how exactly scientists and philosophers have codified human thought and behavior. Rather than focusing on technical contributions in machine building, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence explores a more diverse cast of thinkers who helped to imagine the very kind of human being that might be challenged by a machine. Kevin Padraic Donnelly argues that what we often think of as the “goal” of AI has in fact been shaped by forgotten and discredited theories about people and human nature as much as it has been by scientific discoveries, mathematical advances, and novel technologies. By looking at the development of artificial intelligence through the lens of social thought, Donnelly deflates the image of artificial intelligence as a technological monolith and reminds readers that we can control the narratives about ourselves.    

W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin. But Du Bois was also American to his core, scarred but not crippled by the racial humiliations of his homeland. In Lines of Descent, Kwame Anthony Appiah traces the twin lineages of Du Bois’ American experience and German apprenticeship, showing how they shaped the great African-American scholar’s ideas of race and social identity.

At Harvard, Du Bois studied with such luminaries as William James and George Santayana, scholars whose contributions were largely intellectual. But arriving in Berlin in 1892, Du Bois came under the tutelage of academics who were also public men. The economist Adolf Wagner had been an advisor to Otto von Bismarck. Heinrich von Treitschke, the historian, served in the Reichstag, and the economist Gustav von Schmoller was a member of the Prussian state council. These scholars united the rigorous study of history with political activism and represented a model of real-world engagement that would strongly influence Du Bois in the years to come.

With its romantic notions of human brotherhood and self-realization, German culture held a potent allure for Du Bois. Germany, he said, was the first place white people had treated him as an equal. But the prevalence of anti-Semitism allowed Du Bois no illusions that the Kaiserreich was free of racism. His challenge, says Appiah, was to take the best of German intellectual life without its parochialism—to steal the fire without getting burned.