Cornel West Research Articles

Identity politics and the politics of difference: critical transformations in contemporary thought

This article explores the relationship between identity politics and the politics of difference, focusing especially on the tensions that characterise this relationship within progressive theories and political discourses, and on their implications. The development of the concepts of identity and difference, as well as their limits and possibilities, are examined in relation to several theorists: Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and Judith Butler. This is followed by a discussion of Fromm’s social psychology insofar as it anticipates the growing importance of the concepts of identity and difference within late modern culture, and insofar as it identifies a number of critical concerns around these concepts which remain relevant today.

A Note to the Special Issue on Cornel West’s Prophecy Deliverance!

A Note to the Special Issue on Cornel West’s Prophecy Deliverance!

“James Baldwin, Return of the Prophet”: An Interview

Cornel West was interviewed by Christopher Lydon for Radio Open Source; the interview was originally broadcast in September of 2017. They discuss the works of Baldwin, the condition of America, and Baldwin’s relevance to that condition today. The interview is reprinted here by permission of the interviewee.

If You Live Right, Heaven Belongs to You

Abstract Early lectures, which became the book Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West, were delivered at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, New York. The location of House of the Lord, which West argued was an exemplar of Afro-American revolutionary Christianity, demonstrates the relational and reciprocal insights Pentecostalism shares with West’s commitments to radical historicism and prophetic pragmatism. Several Black descended Pentecostals–scholars Leonard Lovett and Keri Day, and denominational leader Smallwood Williams–enact both a complex cultural analysis, and a robust social analysis. I argue Pentecostal praxis and critical reflection engage and extend West’s corpus and Black critical thought.

Why Prophesying Deliverance Still Matters

Abstract This paper recognizes the 40th anniversary of the publication of Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West, and acknowledges the broad impact of his intellectual leadership. It begins with the important question of whether West has centered or marginalized Pentecostal thought and culture in the presentation of his basic argument regarding the evolution of Black critical thought and prophetic Christianity. Next is an exploration of how West’s ideas about Black revolutionary Christianity find expression in recent studies of Black Pentecostalism, with particular attention to the Pentecostal social imaginary framed by Dale Coulter and by Keri Day.

Expanding the Circle: Emersonian Evasions, Islam, and Norman O. Brown

Abstract The following article is a meditation on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s intellectual genealogy as traced by Cornel West, highlighting and enacting memoir as a literary gesture central to this mode, and proposes that Norman O. Brown be included in that genealogy. The article also features original research that the author conducted at the UCSC Norman O. Brown archive, with special attention given to his lecture series, “The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition” (1980–1981).

“The Best of Us”: A Conversation with Cornel West

“The Best of Us”: A Conversation with Cornel West

Marxism and/as Black Theology: From Cone to West and Back Again

ABSTRACT This paper argues three primary points. First, that James Cone analytically relied on and supported Marxist political economy, especially as concerns its use as an explanation of anti-Black racism. Second, that this Marxist dimension of Cone’s work should be supported, because Marxism remains the most effective political and analytical tool for improving the material conditions of the exploited. Third, that despite his analytical adherence to Marxism as an explanatory theory for understanding and overcoming racism, Cone did not analytically clarify the structural relationship between race and class. This conflation becomes problematic for Cone’s project when class differences and wealth inequality within the Black community – and every “community” – are exacerbated. This shortcoming can be redressed by Cone’s interlocutor Cornel West, who offers a Marxist understanding of the relationship between race and class that allows him to pursue an emancipatory politics that is committed to both anti-racism and anti-capitalism.

Prophetic Witness in the American Empire: A Conversation with Cornel West

Prophetic Witness in the American Empire: A Conversation with Cornel West

‘The whitest guy in the room’: thoughts on decolonization and paideia in the South African university

ABSTRACT This paper will reflect on the possibility of epistemic decolonization, particularly in terms of curriculum, as a transformative educational process in the context of the South African university, and with respect to my own positionality. The argument will centre around two difficult interdependent positions. On the one hand I will argue for the university’s task as transformational, even offering, via Cornel West, the ‘salvific’ possibility that knowledge offers those who seek it. To develop this claim, I will draw on and develop the notion of paideia though the work of Plato and Heidegger. On the other hand, within the postcolonial African university, the question of decolonization in the tertiary space cannot be elided, particularly since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The university is a powerful colonial relic, and it can be used to reinforce and perpetuate epistemic violence through unreflective or unconscious pedagogical and curriculum decisions. Here I draw on decolonial thinkers such as Santos, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe: I argue for a reckoning with the forces of coloniality, and advocate for epistemic justice and criticality, as part of the decolonizing project. In conclusion, working with ideas from Cornel West, I argue to reconcile paideia, as the ‘turning of the soul’, with the decolonizing African university.

Joyful Defiance: Death Does Not Win the Day by Anna Madsen

Reviewed by: Joyful Defiance: Death Does Not Win the Day by Anna Madsen Phil Ruge-Jones Joyful Defiance: Death Does Not Win the Day. By Anna Madsen. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022. 174 pp. This book speaks poignantly to the times we live in. Madsen offers a vision that will speak to any time, but with the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years and the effects of the pandemic, this book cries out as a voice that needs to be heard. She shows how a profound, reflective dive into what is personal can contribute to very public issues. Madsen begins by rooting her reflections in a specific moment of loss that shook her family's life at every level. In 2004, her husband was killed in an accident that also left her son with a traumatic brain injury. As she sat in the funeral service, she found herself in a community, singing familiar words that took on new depth in this crisis, "Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child, or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day." In the death of her beloved, Luther's words connected to a very concrete reality. The rest of the book engages in a theological quest to unpack what "win the day" meant as Madsen sought to rediscover the gift of joy. The titles of the five chapters give a good sense of the themes and flow: The Absence of Lamenting the Absence of God, Joy Comes in the Mourning, Finding Hope When You're Losing Your Grip, Justified for Joy, and Holy Saturday Living. Those familiar with Luther's theology of the cross will recognize something of the trajectory she develops. Her theology joins Luther's in naming "a truth that makes every theologian paying attention gulp" (65). [End Page 237] One of the strengths of this book is the conversation partners she has invited around the table. Many are the usual suspects for theologians of the cross: Martin Luther, Walter Brueggemann, Jürgen Moltmann, and Miroslav Volf. But others are also invited to shape the conversation: Cornel West, Soraya Chemaly, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Toni Morrison. Exchanges she has had with co-conspirators throughout her ministry as a public theologian enrich the dialogue. The result is deepened discourse that offers relevance, reverence, and renewal to the church and the world (the three Rs that guide her theological work at the OMG Center (https://omgcenter.com/). The final chapter witnesses to how her own journey has led her to joyful defiance in the face of real death. We see what each of the concepts she has explored more abstractly looks like as she has lived through her struggle for healing and hope. She ends in a joyful place, "But I can write, with full integrity and honesty, that I can now, almost two decades hence, declare that every moment is sacred, every moment is to be savored, every moment is a possibility to plant a tree, to plant a promise, to plant joyful defiance. … Death is real. … But life, on this eve of whatever tomorrow will bring, is real-er" (165). While her theological and cultural conversation partners add depth to her reflections, in the end the courage with which she charts her own journey makes her claims compelling. Her book is a lively testimony to Luther's great confession, "One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation." Phil Ruge-Jones Grace Lutheran Church Eau Claire, Wisconsin Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

CLASSICAL DIFFUSION

At Howard University, the only historically Black university in the United States with a Classics department, campus leaders decided in 2021 to eliminate that department after a three-year review of its academic programs. The response was vehement and swift, with students, faculty, and alumni condemning the decision as a case of administrative overreach. The philosopher Cornel West described the divestment from the Classics curriculum as a ‘spiritual catastrophe’ for the institution. Few missed the irony that Toni Morrison, one of Howard's most celebrated alumni, studied with Frank Snowden, Jr., a renowned professor of Classics, and received a ‘minor’ in that field as an undergraduate; or that the central inspiration for Morrison's Beloved was a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner who became known as ‘the modern Medea’ for having decided (in 1856, in flight from her master's agents) that it was better to kill her children than see them returned to enslavement in the American South. Others would point to the long tradition of transformational Black thinkers who admit to having been inspired by the classics, including Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry

Reviewed by: To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry Erin R. Pineda Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, editors. To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 464. Paperback, $20.00. In the summer of 2020, as cities across the globe erupted in protest after the murder of George Floyd, references to Martin Luther King, Jr. abounded: while a familiar cast of politicians evoked his memory to scold riotous protestors, others issued King's rejoinder that "the riot is the language of the unheard" (King, "The Other America," 1967). Many such invocations no doubt smacked of the "ritual celebration" and "intellectual marginalization" [End Page 339] that, as Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry observe, have long marked King's reception as a political thinker (2). But in another sense, the seemingly inevitable return to King points to the significant stakes of taking his thought seriously and the political danger of laying claim to interpretive mastery. Struggles over King's legacy and the terms of his thought are not just about King but form part of the discursive terrain on which struggles over the demands of racial justice and the means of transformative collective action are waged. Shelby and Terry's ambitious, illuminating volume, To Shape a New World, first published in 2018 (timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination) and released as paperback in 2020 (amidst the George Floyd uprisings), invites us to take King seriously in just this sense: with an acute sensitivity to the stakes and an embrace of an interpretive pluralism that refuses the certainty of a singular, definitive reading. The collection facilitates rigorous engagement with King's thought in its own time and place but also presses the question of what we ought to do with it in this current "age of impunity and mendacity," standing amid the "unraveling" edges of "American empire," as Cornel West puts it (331). In posing and answering this question across its fifteen essays, the collection seeks to do justice to King as both a political philosopher and a political activist—a religious and political thinker whose philosophies were worked out not only behind the pulpit or within the academy, but also (and perhaps primarily) in concert with others on the field of political action. Indeed, one of its primary contributions is to challenge mainstream presumptions about what counts as political philosophy—its boundaries as a genre as well as the spaces where we imagine political philosophizing to happen and the figures we position as its primary producers. The volume is organized into four sections. The first, "Traditions," is devoted to exploring some of King's diverse intellectual influences. Here, the emphasis is less on making the case for particular traditions as the essential ones, and more on exploring the use of different interpretive lenses for shedding new light on his ideas. Three essays put King in context with thinkers he directly engaged: Robert Gooding-Williams places him in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to reveal the structure of King's account of dignity amid the constraints of racial injustice; Bernard Boxill shows how King's theory of civil disobedience builds on—and collectivizes—Frederick Douglass's account of comparative freedom; and Karuna Mantena explores the theory of nonviolent action that King, through figures like Benjamin Mays and Howard Thurman, adopted and adapted from Gandhi. In contrast, Paul Taylor argues that we should read King in the company of moral perfectionists Stanley Cavell and Christopher Lebron—as showing us how practices of self-criticism, self-transformation, and experimentation enable "citizens to remain dissatisfied with things as they stand" while remaining "open to the possibility that justice will require reconstructing both society and the self" (41). In the next section, contributors turn their attention to King's "Ideals"—the ethical and political imperatives that shape the ends and means of the struggle for a new world. Like Mantena, Martha Nussbaum reads King alongside Gandhi to focus on King's insistence on channeling righteous...

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ed. by Cary Nelson and Michael C. Gizzi

Reviewed by: Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ed. by Cary Nelson and Michael C. Gizzi Jonathan C. Friedman Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Edited by Cary Nelson and Michael C. Gizzi. Philadelphia, and Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press (for Presbyterians for Middle East Peace), 2021. Pp. 638. $45.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. Nelson and Gizzi’s expansive edited volume brings together religious leaders and scholars around three main issues: the different, often divergent, approaches [End Page 127] of the many Christian churches toward Israel; the boycott campaigns of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PCUSA); and the path forward for Israel and Palestine. Nelson is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Gizzi is Professor of Criminal Justice at Illinois State University. The book, the fifth in a series of publications for Nelson contesting the movement advocating a boycott of Israel, is exhaustive in its research and presentation. Nelson begins with an 86-page introduction to the beliefs about, and relations toward, the state of Israel from Christian denominations, including, among others, American Evangelicals, Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Mennonites, and members of the United Church of Christ. Part One features in-depth articles about theology and Zionism and specific denominational approaches to Israel, essentially augmenting Nelson’s introduction. The dividing line is both religious and political; the Evangelical right has been supportive of Israel (some would say because it fulfills “end of days” prophecies), while left-leaning churches have tended to be more critical of Israel. Some, including Presbyterian and Methodist churches, have embraced or considered embracing parts of the boycott/divestment/sanction movement (BDS). The 2009 publication, Kairos Palestine, a theological statement by Palestinian Christians on Israel and Palestine, looms large in this work, appearing multiple times in the discussion of Christian support for BDS. Critics have decried the anti-Zionist theological perspective of Kairos Palestine, along with the absence of language affirming Israel’s right to exist. Part Two centers on the boycott campaigns of the PCUSA. In 2004, its General Assembly voted to support divesting from companies that conducted business in the West Bank. Presbyterian pastors John Wimberly and William Harter write about the genesis and evolution of PCUSA positions, noting that the church altered its position in 2006 to focus on “corporate engagement,” acknowledging the “hurt and misunderstanding” that the 2004 resolution had caused (p. 329). Nelson and Gizzi use the last two chapters of this section to critique the 2014 anti-Zionist Presbyterian publication, Zionism Unsettled. In Part Three, they offer perspectives on reconciliation, with Gizzi emphasizing re-lations through individuals and such groups as Seeds of Peace and Kids4Peace, and Nelson offering specifics for a two-state solution. With full acknowledgment of the book’s import and contribution to scholarship, a greater variety of voices from within the many denominations of global Christianity would have enriched the volume. Assembling clergy from outside [End Page 128] the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, who represent Christianity in all its theological and geographical diversity, and allowing more men and women clergy to have their say, however unpopular some positions might be, would have been a bold choice. Nelson and Gizzi’s admirable frameworks for peace in their final essays also shift the attention from theology to politics in a book that is supposed to be about religion, specifically Christianity. An epilogue from “postmodern” Christians and Jews, such as Brian McLaren, Cornel West, and Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose Network of Spiritual Progressives envisions a healing of Israel and Palestine that is as much spiritual as it is political, would have kept the focus on faith, which is where the book has its most profound and original impact. Jonathan C. Friedman West Chester University, West Chester, PA Copyright © 2023 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston Personalism

‘Black Intellectuals in the Age of Crack’: Organic Responsibility, the Race-Class-Gender Nexus, and Action Paralysis in the Boston Review Roundtables, 1992–1993

ABSTRACT The existing research on the role of intellectuals in alleviating suffering has overlooked contributions by prominent Black intellectuals from the United States in the early 1990s. Two roundtable debates co-organised under the auspices of the Boston Review at Harvard and MIT in 1992 and 1993 in response to Eugene Rivers’ essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack” were central to these contributions, counting a star-studded line-up of Black intellectuals including bell hooks, Cornel West, and Glenn Loury. Participants explore the role of Black intellectuals in the US, debating what they can and should do to combat oppression and domination. In this article, I recover the context of the debates, reconstruct their arguments, and make a case for their major historical and political significance. I comparatively interpret the two roundtables, identifying three major points of convergence. First, participants begin from a Gramscian conception of organic intellectuals, developing this further to defend the need for collective intellectual praxis. Second, the race-class-gender nexus plays a central role in structuring the very possibility of intellectuals affecting social change. Third, these intellectuals subscribe to a significantly pessimistic action paralysis, indicative of the relative powerlessness of intellectual debate in addressing structural oppression.

Not About Race Dance by Gerald Casel

Reviewed by: Not About Race Dance by Gerald Casel Kate Mattingly NOT ABOUT RACE DANCE. By Gerald Casel. CounterPulse, San Francisco. December 15, 2021. Gerald Casel’s investigations into racial dynamics take many forms. Since 2018, Casel has organized Dancing Around Race gatherings, and, in 2021, Not About Race Dance had its premiere at CounterPulse. I watched a recording of Not About Race Dance made available for free in December, the day that bell hooks passed, and sensed hooks’s description of the politics of white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal exclusion in the performance. I, as a white, cisgender woman, am aware of the access and advantages my whiteness has provided and that Casel’s multifaceted performance illuminate. Not About Race Dance, choreographed with movement collaborators Styles Alexander, Audrey Johnson, Karla Quintero, and Cauveri Suresh, vivified the racial politics of postmodern dance. The recording began with a camera situating the viewer within the white walls of CounterPulse while the sound of TLC’s “Waterfalls” filled the space. Casel walked onto the white stage carrying a speaker, accompanied by shouts of joy from the audience. Standing center stage, he faced us. His hips rocked to the rhythm. Words appeared on the back wall: “I am performing an accumulated sequence”; “It’s an adaptation of Trisha Brown’s choreographic device”; “She made a dance entitled ‘Accumulation’ in 1971.” Brown’s gestures, visible in Casel’s actions, were also transmuted. Casel’s dancing signaled Cholly Atkins’s work with the Temptations and the Pips in the 1960s and ’70s: understated cool with exquisite attention to detail and smooth transitions. The moment provoked thoughts about artists of color who are consistently written out of definitions of post-modernism. Brilliantly clear in this initial moment, Casel’s work brings into physical form the theories of Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Cornel West, who have written about the multiple influences, borrowings, and erasures of white postmodernism. Casel remained in one place. His dancing was lush and fluid. Words on the back wall connected this event to Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance from 1994, the same year that TLC released “Waterfalls” (as celebrity artists, TLC also raised awareness for HIV/AIDS). More words appeared: “Seeing this piece made HIV more visible . . . more real.” By associating his work with Greenberg’s performance, Casel highlights how both of these events are performances that intervene in hegemonic systems of erasure. As dance performances these events operate kinesthetically, communicating through our [End Page 378] senses, and offer an intimate sense of connection and vulnerability. Click for larger view View full resolution Audrey Johnson, Gerald Casel, Cauveri Suresh, Styles Alexander, and Karla Quintero in Not About Race Dance. (Photo: Robbie Sweeny.) Born in the Philippines, Casel immigrated to the Bay Area when he was 8 years old. More words appeared: “I am a brown body performing an accumulated sequence in a big white cube to TLC’s ‘Waterfalls.’” About five minutes into this hour-long event, Casel’s solo ended. Duets, trios, and group sections followed. There is a gorgeous intricacy in Casel’s choreography: craft and compositional structure highlight the subtle interactions of dancers’ joints and bodies. Shoulders swivel, elbows elongate, and hips shift to generate a refined and luscious dynamic. Elements of stillness and nuance underscore this physical virtuosity. Aron Altmark’s lighting design projected shadows of dancers on the white walls, transforming a duet into a dance of ten figures. A zig-zagging walking pattern by Casel ended as he descended to the floor, mirroring his duet partner in a reclining pose, their gazes lifted upwards, suggesting odalisques. This moment emphasized my role as a spectator, witness, or perhaps voyeur, highlighting the power dynamics between watchers and the watched. I appreciate the ways that complex questions emerge from Casel’s kinetic and kinesthetic propositions. James Frazier considers Not About Race Dance particularly resonant for its ability to foreground the physical and emotional impact of “accumulation,” and I am indebted to our conversations after watching the recording. (Frazier had seen the performance at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in November.) In postmodern dance, accumulation is a choreographic process that uses a sequence of relatively simple gestures to build...

Erasure at Home, Erasure in the World: Armenian History in Turkey (and Beyond) and Non-Discourses on Modern Political Conflict

On October 16, 2020, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a powerful letter about the war on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) that was signed by scholars who are considered to be among those most actively engaged in postcolonial theory and political activism, including Tariq Ali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, and Cornel West. This letter read: Before the ravages brought in by World War I and the 20th century, Azeris and Armenians in the area lived in the kind of conflictual coexistence with which we are acquainted in the multiethnic parts of the world. We are asking now not only for an agreement to a ceasefire but an insistence on the preservation of that ceasefire and protection for the Armenian minority in its efforts toward self-determination. We hope, in the long run, with the participation of all international institutions of justice, that the democratic will of the ethnic Armenians of the area can be acknowledged.2Yet scholars who specialize in the history of Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East were remarkably silent about this war that will have long-term effects on the small Republic of Armenia (population three million) and the relationships it will be able to maintain with its neighbors, in particular the Republic of Azerbaijan (population ten million) and the Republic of Turkey (population eighty-four million). The latter two countries’ militaries jointly attacked the unilaterally recognized, independent Armenian enclave of Artsakh (population 150,000) during a global pandemic, with help from paid Syrian mercenaries and Turkish military technology.