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    Heresy in the University
    The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals

    Jacques Berlinerblau (Author)

    9780813525884

    Paperback / softback, published 1 March 1999

    304 pages
    23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.399 kg

    Heresy in the University is an exemplary act of adjudication-genuinely clarifying about matters that have so often, most often been obscured by angry polemic, genuinely judicious in a way that only a very capacious, open-minded and broad-ranging mind could manage, charmingly self-conscious about its own limits and yet quite passionate about its loyalties...an exemplary book. - Bruce Robbins (coeditor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation and author of Feeling Global: Inte) Berlinerblau's ability to integrate far-reaching serious scholarly and ethical issues within the substantive content of the Black Athena debate is impressive. - Molly Myerowitz Levine (Howard University, coeditor of The Challenge of Black Athena)

    One of the most controversial books to come out of the academy in the last fifteen years is Martin Bernal's Black Athena. It has been a true cause celebre. Afrocentrists have both praised the book and claimed that Bernal stole from the work of black scholars to create his study of the Afroasiastic roots of classical civilization. Classicists feel passionately about what they perceive as an attack from an outsider on the origins not only of ancient Greece but of their own discipline. It seems that everyone has something to say about the book; the question is how many really understand it. In Heresy in the University, Jacques Berlinerblau provides an exegesis of the contents of Black Athena, making it accessible to a wider audience. As he clarifies and restates Bernal's opus, Berlinerblau identifies Bernal's flaws in reasoning and gaps in evidence. He cuts to the heart of Bernal's prose, singling out the key points of Bernal's argument, explaining and arranging them in a cogent manner. Berlinerblau addresses the critics' really important objections, including his own, and links each of them to the appropriate substantive argument in Black Athena. He goes beyond simple summary and exposition to present the underlying --stated and unstated--agendas of Bernal and his critics. Ultimately, he exposes both sides and asks what the flawed reasoning from all concerned reveals about the stakes in this key academic dispute and what that, in turn, says about the modern academy. Jacques Berlinerblau is an assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Hofstra University.

    Epistemological canyons : the anomic academy
    The ancient model : hard moderns versus idiosyncratic ancient
    The revised ancient model : the heretic's cocktail
    The Aryan models
    Atmospheric determinism
    The antinomies of Martin Bernal
    A "
    total contestation"
    of the research university : "
    beware the nonspecialist"

    The academic Elvis
    Reconfiguring the ancient Egyptians : Bernal's strategic reading
    Contentious communities : "
    blacks and Jews"
    and Black Athena
    We scholars : heresy in the university/Intellectual responsibility/passionate ambivalence
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