Dathorne's approach is basically literary and historical, but he has also developed his argument around politics, popular culture, language, and even landscape architecture. He looks at Europe as a mental construct of philosophies and politics that both the English and European Americans identified with Greece and Rome. Dathorne shows how much of what we think of as European heritage is actually of African and/or Islamic background. He shows the founders of the U.S. to be idealistic Athenian-type elites, unlikely to allow humanity to govern as a citizenship. The book discusses the literary history of the ex-colony of America with its own special lens, showing how again and again the makers of the American myth failed to come to terms with the multicultural realities.

O. R. Dathorne pursues the phenomenon of "contact" or "encounter" particularly as it relates to China and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. He looks at how the Chinese have perceived their Other as heathen and exotic, and how the West has in turn similarly perceived the Chinese. The failure of the West to relate to China in human terms is subtly documented, and is contrasted to the European experience in the New World and the African encounter of both China and the West. Dathorne breaks new ground in his analysis of the construct of the Other on the Pacific Islands. Using indigenous oral accounts, early texts of European explorers and castaways, and imaginative accounts, he reconstructs the period of contact from the native viewpoint, of those who acted as translators, pilots, guides, chartmakers and male and female companions. He calls attention to the Western habit of romancing the place while denigrating or mythologizing the people.

This is a study of the manner in which certain mythical notions of the world become accepted as fact. Dathorne shows how particular European concepts such as El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, a race of Amazons, and monster (including cannibal) images were first associated with the Orient. After the New World encounter they were repositioned to North and South America. The book examines the way in which Arabs and Africans are conscripted into the view of the world and takes an unusual, non-Eurocentric viewpoint of how Africans journeyed to the New World and Europe, participating in, what may be considered, an early stage of world exploration and discovery. The study concludes by looking at European travel literature from the early journeys of St. Brendan, through the Viking voyages and up to Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville. In all these instances, the encounters seem to justify mythical belief. Dathorne's interest in the subject is both intellectual and passionate since, coming from Guyana, he was very much part of this malformed Weltschmerz.

Long before the physical advent of Blacks in Europe, Professor Dathorne asserts they featured over and over again in literature as marginalized Others, but rarely were real Blacks present. As English developed as a language, race came into the evolution of the signifiers, so that words like darkness, blackness, and so on became heavily charged with negative connotations.

Using travel literature as well as figures on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and material from later writers, Dathorne shows how negative elements surrounding Blackness were transferred to Native Americans, to Indians from India, to South Pacific islanders, and others. A provocative analysis for scholars, students, and researchers involved with Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and race.

The Black Mind was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The comprehensive account of the development of African literature from its beginnings in oral tradition to its contemporary expression in the writings of Africans in various African and European languages provides insight, both broad and deep, into the Black intellect. Professor Dathorne examines the literature of Africans as spoken or written in their local languages and in Latin, French, Portuguese, and English. This extensive survey and interpretation gives the reader a remarkable pathway to an understanding of the Black imagination and its relevance to thought and creativity throughout the world. The author himself lived in Africa for ten years, and his view in not that of an outsider, since it is as a Black man that he speaks about Black people. Throughout the book, a major theme is the demonstration that, despite slavery and colonialism, Africans remained very close to their own cultures. Professor Dathorne shows that African writers may be, like some Afro-American writers, "marginal men," but that they are Black men and it is as Black men that they feel the nostalgia of their past and the corrosive influences of their present. The chapters are divided into sections: Tradition; Heritage; The Presence of Europe; and Crosscurrents. In the final chapters the author extends the thread of continuity to the New World-Africa as present in the work of Black writers in the United States and in the Caribbean.