Eldridge Cleaver Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jack Richardson

Critical Essay by Jack Richardson

The madness takes its toll, but it should be clear, before all critical connection between the black and white sensibility breaks down, that, for the Negro writer, madness comes not in hating the white world but in hating it without style. A lucid rage can be an effective cultural weapon; literary delirium tremens can only bog down everyone's anger. This frenzy to set up an official literary barricade, to uncover symbols and tales which will promote some sort of atavistic tribal unity, can lead very quickly to a crippled art that threatens nothing. In the rush to do away with the racial double consciousness, it cannot be forgotten that art produces its own version of this division and that it has its own standards of manhood. What Eldridge Cleaver, for example, does to the white consciousness in Soul on Ice is shattering precisely because he appreciates and meets those standards,...
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