Full Description
This fascinating, visually innovative documentary reveals the pioneering work and controversial legacy of American Jewish anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, a towering scholar often credited with inventing the field of African studies in the 1920s through the 50s. Herskovits’s groundbreaking field research, conducted in an era when Jews and blacks were unwelcome either as academics or as subjects of dignified study, dared to find that African American cultures are distinct and African-based—a tidal shift in the image (and self-image) of blacks in America. Ironically, his very authority also sparked an ongoing, racially charged power struggle over who gets to tell the story of a people
