In Black Heart Richards offers a sagacious and oftentimes fierce critique of modern black literary studies in America, during which the author defiantly condemns its inner sanctum of signifying initiators and cultivators. This highly divisive book has received minimal public reaction in America, no doubt because its target audience is made up of the very scholars that Richards admonishes. Richards accuses modern African American literary culture of being culturally, politically, intellectually, socially and, most captivatingly, morally ersatz and hollow. The author perceives signifying as being vague, lazy, tricksterish, grossly oversimplistic and vacuous, and such provocative phraseology demands comprehensive explanation. Thankfully, Richards entirely succeeds in providing legitimate ammunition for what is a very studious assault on an extremely popular tradition.

In the first three chapters, Richards demonstrates why and how Henry Louis Gates has (mis)read certain texts in the quest to further his own politico-literary agenda and provides examples of other presently overlooked African American literature to further negate or problematize Gates's popular theory. During these very successful chapters Richards develops an incisive analysis of the shortcomings of Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and an illuminating comparison between Sterling Brown and Gates's literary prowess to challenge the foundations of Gates's theory. The author argues that, compared to Brown, Gates has ignored the factual and symbolic context of the literature he has exploited and is unable to analyse this literature with the necessary complexity due to a lack of literary grounding and an incompatible identity hopping between the academic elite and the lower-class street. Richards similarly locates a “fierce wrenching of texts and facts” (94) in Gates-influenced theological works by Will Coleman and Katherine Bassard. Using a thorough knowledge of American literary history, the author demonstrates how these critics have misunderstood nineteenth-century black literature, such as the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, forgoing its political realism to assert a naive black romanticism. The first half of Black Heart is the most sustained section of the book and, together with its introspective preface and candid introduction, it delivers a brilliant, intensive challenge to the tradition of signifying.

Throughout the remaining nine chapters, Richards focusses more on the moral tragedy of the signifying syndrome, arguing that far from being humanists, the ironic signifiers alienate themselves from reality and ultimately inhabit a primitivized fantasy world that is unable to relate to the grim realities of black “lumpen” life. Many of these chapters are tantalizingly short, at times resembling detailed reviews, and the book's focus occasionally fades, though Richards's obvious literary acumen ensures his assertions remain persuasive. Importantly, Richards proposes his own list of the true exemplars of African American literary ability, including Robert Hayden, Benjamin Mays and Arthur Davies, whom he feels all had the self-consciousness and social awareness to articulate black culture. Through positing this alternative canon, the author pinpoints the texts needed to restore the ruins of black literary studies. In his closing words, Richards boldly asserts that many signifiers are little more than zip-coon minstrels. Whether one can accept such a devastating conclusion, Black Heart is so rigorously argued that, after reading, it is difficult to ignore the real problems that lie at the heart of signifying.