Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quote

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“On the populist left, the then favored model of the oppositional spokesman was what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual”: someone who participated in and was part of the community he would uplift. And yet James Baldwin’s basic conception of himself was formed by the familiar, and still well-entrenched, idea of the alienated artist or intellectual, whose advanced sensibility entailed his estrangement from the very people he would represent. Baldwin could dramatize the tension between these two models – he would do so in his fiction – be he was never to resolve it.”
– Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Welcome Table



[From the anthology: Lure and Loathing: Twenty black intellectuals address W.E.B. Du Bois’s dilemma of the double-consciousness of African Americans. Edited by Gerald Early.]



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