American Intellectual Tradition Research Articles

A Loving Reclamation of the Unutterable: Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone as Excellent Performers of Nomenclature

A Loving Reclamation of the UnutterablePatricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone as Excellent Performers of Nomenclature I. Augustus Durham (bio) And I will show you still a more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . . . [L]ove is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. —I Corinthians 12:31b–13:1; 4b–7 There is something to be said for the unadulterated agency of a person who is preoccupied with changing her name. Sans biological features, a name, one’s name, is the initial marker of identity at the very moment of nascence. And yet, names are given painstakingly; they are labored over and put through a series of permutations, with other names, in order to find the proper timbre for optimal acoustic quality. People are often given this identif ier in order to live into something, for better or worse, that may signify their progenitors’ current circumstance, or even as a response to occasions of intrauterine vicissitudes prior to in-breaking. An example of this would be African cultures such as that of the Zulus in South Africa. In Zulu culture, one’s name is not chosen—the name chooses her.1 [End Page 28] For perhaps a more local example of this methodology, we need only to look to Audre Lorde: I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct.2 “Y” as a linearly dangling modifier literally wears on Lorde inasmuch as she “puts it on” in order to oblige her maternal piety. And yet even with the eventual correction, or better yet deletion, of her nomenclatural y-chromosome, we find that Zami becomes the new spelling of her name, that is, that which was once unutterable by Lorde’s fellow mortals is lovingly (re)claimed by Lorde so that she can become herself: an ordinary, brown braided woman.3 And should the reclamation of a name, in its most basic actualization, be nothing more than an act of love? From our earliest African predisposition toward naming to our recently historic proclamation as African Americans, black peoples’ status as American citizens is bound up in what we are called by others and ourselves. A sociolinguistic retrospective on the transformation of black bodies from nigras to niggas may itself suggest that comprehending the chasm existent between our African ancestry and our acclimatized Americanity is as abecedary as the differentiation of what an “r” is from a “g.” Nevertheless, though these preoccupations permeate the black American existence, unloving gongs and cymbals, who have throughout time attempted to haphazardly coin terms and phrases that remain costly to said black Americans, still stand to be shown a more excellent way of performing nomenclature. And these excellent performances are most certainly exemplified in aspects of the African American intellectual tradition. Hence, I assert that the contributions of black women, specifically Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone, provide a glimpse into realms of excellence that impart the inherent failures of naming systems that are deficient in rudimentary iterations of love. As such, their respective intellectual milieus allow for the deployment of the proverbial name-it-and-claim-it ideology that pervades (post)modern culture. These women merge the cerebral with the ontological in order to illumine both the importance of naming as well as the methods by which proper names were and are sullied by improper pronouncements from within and without. Thus, whether through the utility of scholarly research or...

“The Effort of Reason, and the Adventure of Beauty”: The Aesthetic Rhetoric of Randolph Bourne

We are still coming to terms with the legacy of Randolph Bourne. Although he died at the age of 32 just as the United States was cheerfully entering the First World War under the banner of “democracy,” the words he penned in an unfinished essay still resonate in the American social conscience: “War is the Health of the State.” This maxim, once thought the exclusive property of leftist radicals, now can be heard echoing from every political corner of the blogosphere as progressives and libertarians alike find cause to question the motives of governmental power. Yet despite his reappearance as a symbol, Bourne in many ways remains as forgotten as ever—perhaps even more so as his once provocative claim has been transformed into a talking point. This essay endeavors to recapture the voice of Bourne in all its complexity, seeking to place him at the forefront of the contemporary American intellectual tradition as one of its most piercing critics, most visionary poets, and most eloquent rhetors. Specifically, we show how Bourne's critique of the “State” foresaw the rise of the technological society organized by ideological propaganda, how his vision of the Beloved Community anticipated our modern ideals of global transnationalism, and how his literary essays practiced a form of aesthetic rhetoric which employed dramatistic methods to bring about a new state of expanded social consciousness.

New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

Democracy under Pressure: A Lippmann-Dewey Dialog

Democracy is deliberation and discussion: Walter Lippmann and John Dewey gave a formidable illustration of the dignity of the democratic debate through their writings. The two essays presented here illustrate the relevance of their thinking to understand the challenges of twenty-first century democracy. Both should be read as introductions to the works of two giants who eminently contributed to the American intellectual tradition and who enlighten democratic theory and practice. Dr Regalzi’s...

WHAT IS OUR “CANON”? HOW AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORIANS DEBATE THE CORE OF THEIR FIELD

These selected excerpts from a conversation now running nearly a quarter-century about The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook exemplify the efforts made by specialists in American intellectual history to decide just what constitutes the core of their field. An anthology designed for undergraduates has practical limitations, to be sure, that prevent its table of contents from ever serving as a complete map of a field. Specific research questions, not arguments over canons, properly remain the deepest center of gravity of any cohort of scholars. But assignments to students are one important indicator of what scholar–teachers take to be important, and these assignments are not unrelated to choices these same individuals make about the topics of their monographic contributions. Hence the lively correspondence that my coeditor, Charles Capper, and I have carried on with dozens of colleagues concerning the six editions of the only collection of sources for this field currently in print offers a window on how American intellectual history has changed in the last generation and what are its current directions.

Culture and Identity in Higher Education Research: Disciplinary Culture and Institutional Culture

The purposes of this article is to develop a cultural approach in higher education studies. It will be argued that the cultural approach is rooted mainly in two different intellectual starting points to analyze academic communities as cultural entities: studies of disciplinary cultures and institutional cultures. Notions of disciplines as cultural entities have been developed in Europe in relation to the “two cultures” topic and to issues developed in the sociology of knowledge. The institutional studies tradition is, in turn, rooted in the American intellectual tradition, where cultural concerns emerge from institutional level phenomena whether they concern students, faculty or higher education institutions. The article discusses the pros and cons of these traditions in order to find new avenues for future research. It will be argued that academic identity provides a seminal perspective for cultural studies in higher education.

The Spirituality of Václav Havel in Its Czech and American Contexts

The religious thought of Václav Havel is examined in the context of Czech and American intellectual and spiritual traditions. The line begins with the worldview canonized by T. G. Masaryk. Masaryk drew inspiration from the American tradition of religious thought, rooted in the Enlightenment deistic interpretation of Christianity, embodied in Unitarianism. It was this line of thought that was passed down to Václav Havel by his father V. M. Havel. Masaryk’s “Unitarian” style of thinking about religion was developed by Havel in his Letters to Olga. During the 1970s, this influence merges with another intellectual stream, the “Kampademia” group. This line of thought combines Patočka’s tradition of phenomenology with new philosophical approaches to Catholicism and stimulated by the American “New Science”. According to Masaryk’s “enlightened” and “Unitarian” tradition, old religion, expressed with the aid of rituals, was to be surpassed and replaced by a “scientific” and “progressive” religion. For the tradition of Kampademia, on the other hand, it is this old religion, with its myths and rituals, that should be revived. Thus, Havel takes seriously the basis of all ancient spiritual traditions—Christian, Jewish, “heathen,” hermetic. It is in this public and symbolic appeal to “old” religious traditions before the eyes of a secular Czech society, this readiness to learn from the experiences of other traditions, and the declared humility to not attempt a synthesis of these traditions (as according to “classic” New Age) that Havel’s primary contribution to the spiritual thought of the present can be found.

Nineteenth‐Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition ‐ Edited by Burke, Janet and Humphrey, Ted (eds.)

Nineteenth‐Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition ‐ Edited by Burke, Janet and Humphrey, Ted (eds.)

TheInternational Political “Sociology of a Not So International Discipline”9

The question “what is or can be international political sociology beyond the European and North American traditions in social and political thought?” rests on an apparent divide between two worlds of knowledge about “the international”: that of “the West” and “the rest.” The former's interest in the latter implies that these two worlds are so alienated and/or distinct from each other that there has transpired a need for engagement. This is not to contest Forum Editors’ observation regarding “the dominance of European and North American intellectual traditions” in International Relations (IR) as evinced in most mainstream journals and some non-mainstream ones. Nor is it to downplay important insights to be gleaned from hearing from “the rest.” Rather, it is to suggest that the way this question is formulated risks essentializing these two worlds, thereby disallowing further inquiry into knowledge as produced in/by “the rest.” In what follows I will seek to go beyond the present reality of multiple worlds of knowledge about the international and call for inquiry into their emergence and persistence. My point being, moving beyond the current “dominance” of European and North American intellectual traditions requires looking into the international politics of the ways in which the international is studied in different parts of the world. As such, I join the plea for inquiring into the sociology of the discipline; but I still want to underscore the international politics dimension— not only in terms of studying how events “out there” shape IR (a preoccupation of mainstream accounts), but also in terms of how IR in different parts of the world has evolved in the attempt to shape international politics. I will make three points. My first point is that the assumption behind this Forum (that knowledge production in Europe and North America and “the rest” are alienated …

Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition: A Reader

Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition: A Reader

The Black American Intellectual Tradition, 1850–1900, and William Sanders Scarborough

The Black American Intellectual Tradition, 1850–1900, and William Sanders Scarborough

“VARIOUS KINDS OF MADNESS:”

Drawing comparisons with the introduction of deconstruction to America and its perceived discontinuity with North American intellectual traditions, this paper discusses the arrival of a different strain of poststructuralism in America—the French Nietzscheanism of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard. It isolates the presence and function of American oppositional discourses, such as the countercultural or anti-psychiatric, within French Nietzscheanism and asserts there exists a more intimate link between these French and American oppositional discourses than is customarily assumed. French Nietzscheanism entered America via the Schizo-culture conference, organized by Sylvère Lotringer in Columbia, 1975. The examination of this neglected, though intriguing event produces a valuable snapshot of the transition that oppositional discourses on both sides of the Atlantic underwent as the sixties gave way to the seventies.

The American Intellectual Tradition and Multi-culturalism

The American Studies Institute of Seoul, Korea, states as one of its purposes, “the task of studying and explaining American culture from an Asian perspective.” All the authors in its monograph series are Koreans, and the publishing list includes subjects ranging from American foreign policy to literature to law and to race. Hyungdae Lee has contributed to the series a polemical work. He is going after big game. Although the title of this book references multiculturalism, it constitutes for Lee only an epiphenomenon. Postmodernism furnishes the larger target, and Lee presses his quarry with abandon. Postmodernism constitutes for Lee a stark break from what he describes as “the American intellectual tradition.” He believes it is a toxic import from Europe and an alien presence in American culture. Lee insists that in its recourse to identity politics—race, gender, ethnicity, religion—postmodernism fractures or dissolves nationhood or any sense of a collective American experience or a shared culture. In all notions of authority, postmodernists, Lee charges, see only discourses of power.

BOOKS IN SUMMARY

Books reviewed in this article:Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Jaume Aurell and Francisco CrosasAn Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke. Edited by Ian CroweToward a Global Community of Historians: The International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences 1898‐2000. By Karl Dietrich Erdmann; edited by Jürgen Kocka and Wolfgang J. Mommsen in collaboration with Agnes Blänsdorf; translated by Alan NothnagleRace, Culture and the Intellectuals 1940‐1970. By Richard H. KingThe American Intellectual Tradition and Multiculturalism. By Hyungdae LeeThe Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. By Tomoko MasuzawaCommonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution. By Jonathan ScottHerbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History. By Keith C. Sewell

By its cover: modern American book cover design

First ever survey on central subject of American design history. This book contains 200 beautiful full colour images. Famous practitioners are represented from all eras of American design. It covers many great authors including Joyce, Pound, Camus, Roth etc. It has a great cover of its own by hot designer John Gall. It makes a great reference album/idea book for the practitioner. By Its Cover is a survey of American book cover design, from the inception of the modern book industry at the turn of the 20th century to the present day. It is the first ever comprehensive examination of some of the most beautiful and influential works of American graphic design. By Its Cover traces the trajectory of such early masters of illustration as E. McKnight Kauffer, Rockwell Kent, and typographer W.A. Dwiggins. It follows their lead through the modernism of Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Roy Kuhlman, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast and concludes with contemporary masters such as Barbara de Wilde, Chip Kidd, and Michael Ian Kaye. As the authors write, Books and their covers are vital, physical manifestations of an evolving American intellectual tradition. The cover is a book's first communication to the reader, a graphic representation not simply of its content, but its moment in history - in the history of American design, in the history of American literature, in the history of American culture.

Hyungdae Lee. The American Intellectual Tradition and Multiculturalism. Seoul: American Studies Institute, Seoul National University, 2003. Price unavailable.

Hyungdae Lee. The American Intellectual Tradition and Multiculturalism. Seoul: American Studies Institute, Seoul National University, 2003. Price unavailable.

Biography, Race Vindication, and African American Intellectuals

The Special Issue published in celebration of 80th Anniversary of The Journal of Negro History (JNH) focused on what African American intellectuals do in general, and what historians and other social scientists have done best in pages of JNH. The Association for Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) was formed in Chicago in October 1915 by Carter G. Woodson, George Cleveland Hall, W. B. Hargrove, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps for the collection of sociological and historical data on Negro, study, of peoples of African blood, publishing of books in this field, and promotion of harmony between races. The first issue of JNH appeared shortly thereafter in January 1916, and Carter G. Woodson, editor, made it clear this was to be quarterly scientific magazine committed to publishing scholarly research and documents on history and cultures of Africa and peoples of African descent around (1) From beginning Carter G. Woodson knew JNH would be important for When public saw a well-printed scientific magazine, presenting scholarly current articles and valuable documents giving facts scarcely known, Woodson recalled in 1925, the students of history and correlated fields highly praised effort and warmly welcomed publication. Woodson understood publishing these articles and collecting these materials was only way that Negro [could] escape awful fate of becoming a negligible factor in thought of world. The activities pursued by members of ASNLH would enable scientifically trained men [and women] to produce treatises based on whole truth. (2) In Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and Making of African American Intellectual Tradition, V. P. Franklin used life-writings of African American literary artists and political leaders to demonstrate vindication was a major activity for black intellectuals from early nineteenth century. African American preachers, professors, publishers, and other highly educated professionals put their intellect and training in service to the to deconstruct discursive structures erected in science, medicine, law, and historical discourse to uphold mental and cultural inferiority of African peoples. The autobiographical works written by Alexander Crummell, Ida Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, Harry Haywood, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois described nature of relationship between experience and ideology. These important spokespersons used their life writings to tell truth about themselves and their people, and expose lies abou t nature of European and American cultures and societies being spread internationally by white supremacists. While autobiographical writings of Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka no longer presented an overarching concern for race vindication, biographical studies of these artists and intellectuals presented in Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths revealed important connections between their personal experiences and ideological commitments. (3) BLACK NATIONALISTS AND RACE VINDICATION Many biographical studies of African American intellectuals have focused on individual's commitment to telling truth about Africa and people of African descent. Those black preachers, publishers, and other professionals in nineteenth century who subscribed to black nationalist ideological positions understood importance of race vindication. Along with belief in distinct and positive African group traits, consciousness of shared oppression at hands of whites, awareness of mutual duties and responsibilities of African peoples to each other, and need for black self-determination and solidarity, black nationalists from early nineteenth century believed in and practiced race vindication. …

African American Contributions to Composition Studies

American intellectual and rhetorical traditions. Free Black churches, culturally specific jeremiads, slave narratives, secret schools, Black women's clubs, and Black colleges all represent an enriching merger of African American intellectual and activist concerns with writing instruction initiatives. I do not have space here to catalog the entire effort, though I do hope to spur some impassioned archival research. Nor do I suggest that African American composition activity has been uniform in its import. Undoubtedly, as has been the case in the field at large, there has been contestation, even personal contradictions, concerning purposes and goals. There have been, for example, numerous African American scholars and educators with back-to-basics, skill-and-drill, and eradicationist tendencies. I reference those outlooks to some degree in the following pages, but my bias lies elsewhere. My primary intention is to trace a line of thought from early rhetors and scholars to contemporary researchers, thinkers, and practitioners that both emphasizes critical pedagogy and values Black culture, especially its vernacular language. This is the strand of thinking that I find most attractive and persuasive because I view it, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, to be the thinking most consistent with the need to produce critical and astute African American students. So of course I am slipping in the argument that the best and most informed African American intellects of the past two

Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist

This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.---Cornel West A very detailed, and fascinating account of Hook's formative years . . . [a] first-rate contribution to the history of American leftist intellectual life.---Richard Rorty, Raritan Fascinating . . . well researched and packed with information.---Times Literary Supplement Succeeds in establishing the young Hook as a dedicated revolutionary Marxist.---Amos Perlmutter, Washington Times A brilliant, lucid portrait of a scholar, adversarial by temperament, who turned his extraordinary powers of analysis and polemic successively against capitalism, Stalinism, and the New Left.---Alan Wald, Monthly Review The best study of Hook's thought. . . . Supersedes all earlier treatments.---David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition A major contribution to our understanding of Hook and the American Marxist tradition. . . . Extremely insightful.---American Studies Persuasive. . . . Discovers not just a brilliant interpreter of Marx and the Russian Revolution, but a remarkable advocate and practitioner of the Americanization of Marxism.---In These Times Phelps's effort to uncover, explore, and analyze Hook's forgotten leftism must be judged unqualified success.---Left Penetrating, closely argued, and lucid. . . . An important contribution to the history of American radicalism in the 1930s.---Labor History One of the most controversial figures in the history of American philosophy, Sidney Hook was an intellectual street fighter, who began his career as a brilliant Marxist thinker and probably the greatest polemicist of [the 20th] century (Edward Shils) before breaking with the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Turning in his later years to allegiance with American conservatives including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Hook is now widely known as intellectual father of the neoconservative movement.

Bauman in Germany

This text of a lecture describes the importance of Zygmunt Bauman's work for sociological theory and intellectual debate in Germany. The main points are: (1) the tension between the German Sonderweg thesis and Bauman's analysis of the Holocaust; (2) the relationship between Bauman's theory of modernity/postmodernity and the writings of Elias, Horkheimer/Adorno and Beck; (3) a critique of Bauman's neglect of democratic alternatives within modernity, particularly American intellectual and political traditions; and (4) a discussion of Bauman's emphasis on pre-societal sources of morality in his postmodern ethics and the pragmatist understanding of intersubjectivity and morality.