Andrew Hartman

The History curriculum in schools adopts a grand narrative approach that pushes the history of the non-dominant to the margins and even to obscurity. To secure an authentic approach to Black history, the authors have developed an enquiry-based approach that gives teachers the knowledge and confidence to teach the History curriculum inclusively. The book presents five discrete enquiries. Of three on African-American history, the first deals with the Civil Rights movement, asking why Robert E. Williams has been forgotten. A chapter takes teachers up to Obama’s time, and a third, written by Jenice Lewis, describes how the US program, Teaching for Change, has pioneered work that imbues history teaching with justice. The two chapters on British Black history tackle the issue of invisibility, asking why Somali people decided to unpack their bags in Britain; and why Claudia Jones, founder of the first Black journal in England, and founder of the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival has no memorial plaque outside her house in England nor in her homeland. One chapter on African history looks at African Empires and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and one looks – sideways – at apartheid in South Africa.

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. ​ Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.