Profit and oppression

Black culture was long denied recognition. The danger now is that it is being turned into another commodity

"You have to be careful, very careful, introducing the truth to the black man who has never previously heard the truth about himself, his own kind and the white man." Malcolm X issued this caution in 1964.

Today, it seems, no circumspection is necessary. Library shelves creak under the weight of almanacs, yearbooks, encyclopedias and other volumes chronicling African-American cultural achievements. For years, it seemed, interest was confined to dramatic depictions of the epic history of bondage and driven rootlessness; the aesthetic products of the experience were largely ignored.

Then, in 1967, Ploski and Brown's The Negro Almanac opened the way for hundreds of comparable publications. African-American culture is well and truly open for business: the "invisible man", once written of by Ralph Ellison, now looms larger than life.

The Norton Anthology, ordered chronologically rather than by genre, runs from the mid-18th century to the present and covers novels, poems, essays, speeches, plays, song lyrics and other narratives. For the most part this is the work of compilers (they call it "a celebration"), not exegetists, still less critical appraisers. But it is also meant to serve didactic purposes: the selections are intended "to sustain classroom interest . . . to give instructors choices . . . to free the student from the need for reference books".

The collection opens with the fascinating story of the Senegal-born slave Phillis Wheatley who, in 1773, was subjected to an oral examination in a Boston court to determine whether a black person was capable of writing her exquisite poetry. The court decided in her favour and thus gave official recognition that culture was not...