The Cornel West Reader (Basic Civitas Book)

The Cornel West Reader (Basic Civitas Book)

Cornel West

Language: English

Pages: 624

ISBN: 0465091105

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Cornel West is one of the nation’s premier public intellectuals and one of the great prophetic voices of our era. Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he is speaking of Emerson, Gramsci, or Marvin Gaye, his work radiates a passion that reflects the rich traditions he draws on and weaves togetherÑBaptist preaching, American transcendentalism, jazz, radical politics. This anthology reveals the dazzling range of West’s work, from his explorations of ”Prophetic Pragmatism” to his philosophizing on hip-hop.The Cornel West Reader traces the development of West’s extraordinary career as academic, public intellectual, and activist. In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America’s social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

interesting yet impotent bourgeois attacks on the forms of thought and categories of a "dead" tradition, a tradition that stipulates the lineage and sustains the very life of these deconstructions. My claim here is not simply that these attacks valorize textuality at the expense of power, but, more important, that they are symbiotic with their very object of criticism; that is, they remain alive only as long as they give life to their enemy. In short, deconstructionist assaults must breathe life

economic vanguardism beyond the social and geographic frontiers of the conventional vanguards, we need national and local governments able to help create the missing conditions and to help form the missing agents. We should reject the false choice between the idea of arms'-length government (embraced by free-market orthodoxy) and the contrasting practice (exemplified by some of the northeast Asian "tiger economies") of a centralized economic bureaucracy formulating industrial and trade strategy,

attributed not only to the relevance of their perspectives for the oppressed, but also to the hope that these theologies would breathe new life into a fading and faltering mode of intellectual reflection. To put it crudely, liberation theologies were expected to both change the world and keep theology alive. Yet as the zenith of liberation theological reflection fades, we witness the proliferation of philosophical investigations, cultural critiques, social analyses and historical reconstructions

from himself (including the white supremacy in him)-echoes that of Ahab in Melville's classic Moby-Dick (1851), Attwater in Robert Louis Stevenson's late masterpiece The Ebb-Tide (1894) and Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness (1902). 57. Wright, Native Son, pp. 22-23. 58. Ibid., p. 388. 59. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 146. 60. Wright, Native Son, pp. 237, 238. 61. Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 11. For a fuller and richer elaboration of this Ellisonian insight, the classic

pragmatism is a form of tragic thought in that it confronts candidly individual and collective experiences of evil in individuals and institutions-with little expectation of ridding the world of all evil. Yet it is a kind of romanticism in that it holds many experiences of evil to be neither inevitable nor necessary, but rather the results of human agency, i.e., choices and actions. This interplay between tragic thought and romantic impulse, inescapable evils and transformable evils makes

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