Cornel West Research Articles

Blue-Collar Writing for Fruitful Dialogue?

Norman Denzin has called for a reformed discourse to enable qualitative researchers to achieve a fruitful dialogue about democracy and social justice throughout the world. In this essay, I endorse Denzin’s emancipatory project which uses a critical framework modeled on writers such as Wright Mills, Paulo Freire, bel hookes, and Cornell West. I use material from Freire and Mills especially to suggest that fruitful dialogue also requires us as researchers and writers to become simpler, even “blue-collar,” in our own craft-writing. I do so in the hope that we can learn to speak and write “human” and move away from what Mills called the “academic pose.”

Minority Writing as a Challenge to the National Literary Canon: The Case of Lithuania

This article investigates the question of literary canon formation in presentday Lithuania from the perspective of minority writing and in the context of Western canon theory. The author focuses on debates around literary canon that were stimulated by the ideology of liberal pluralism, and which took place in American academia and public discourse during the 1970s and 1980s; these debates are reflected in publications by Cornell West, John Guillory, and Mikhail Gronas, and are useful in demonstrating the peculiarities of the Lithuanian context.The first peculiarity is the specific history of the minority-majority relationship. In Lithuania, the largest minorities are Poles and Russians, who are perceived in the national historical narrative as former colonizers (primarily Russians, but also Poles, who controlled Vilnius during the inter-war period). The second is the fact that the literary traditions of the languages spoken by these minorities have greater cultural capital in “the World Republic of Letters” than does the Lithuanian literary tradition. In Lithuania, minority literatures are mostly written in minority languages, and this creates additional obstacles for including them in the national literary canon. The third peculiarity is the isolated existence of minority writing and its criticism in Lithuania – it stays within academia, thereby producing no effect on public discourse.The article concludes that in Lithuania, for the time being, minority discourses and the canon debate do not intersect in any significant way. Lithuanian society has not yet developed the need for multicultural selfreflexivity. The crisis of the literary canon here is mostly seen as a byproduct of de-Sovietization, but also – and here the situations in Lithuania and Western countries are similar – of the devaluation of literature as a form of cultural capital.

Principled, Pragmatic, and Purposive Leadership

This article reimagines educational leadership using Cornel West's notions of prophetic spirituality. Three categories of leadership—principled, pragmatic, and purposive—are proposed. All three are grounded in the components of West's prophetic spirituality, namely, a deep-seated moralism, an inescapable opportunism, and an aggressive or profound pessimism. The article argues that the transformation of educational leadership necessitates searching for a unique way to alter its construction. Using an African American spiritual frame is suggested as one way to bring about such fundamental change in the field.

Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits: Rhetorical Styles and Public Engagement, Anna M. Young

As I read and reread Young’s text for this review, I was struck by news of the activist and professor Cornel West stating, during an October 12 speech at the “Faith in Ferguson” rally, “I didn’t co...

Queering, gazing and containment in Giovanni’s Room

Abstract This article traces the relationship among three ubiquitous critical terms and the ostensibly disparate concepts they encompass: containment, intervention and the male gaze. Though these terms became prevalent late in the twentieth century, when they began to pervade ‘literary theory’, my article demonstrates how James Baldwin’s 1956 novel, Giovanni’s Room, proleptically lays the ground work for the interplay among these concepts and how Baldwin remained preoccupied both avant la lettre and throughout his career, as a novelist, critic and polemicist, with many of the questions that late twentieth-century-intellectuals, literary theorists, feminist critics addressed, including Salman Rushdie, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cornel West and John Gaddis. In providing a context for the evolution of these preoccupations, this argument also highlights some of Baldwin’s formative influences and connections among such contemporaries of his as Norman Mailer, Wilhelm Reich and Lionel Trilling.

Make Revolution Irresistible: The Role of the Cultural Worker in the Twenty-First Century

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.

Toward Radicalizing Community Service Learning

This article advocates a radicalized theoretical construction of community service learning. To accomplish this radicalization, I initially take up a discussion of traditional understandings of CSL rooted in pragmatic/progressive thought. I then suggest that this traditional structural foundation can be radicalized by incorporating Deborah Britzman's (1998) “difficult knowledge” and Cornell West's (1989) historic catastrophe into that traditional structure. In conclusion, I discuss the implications that such a radicalized understanding of CSL entails.

Race and class distinctions within black communities in the United States and United Kingdom: a reading in phenomenological structuralism

This article examines the constitution of black consciousness within the United States and Great Britain via structuration theory and phenomenological structuralism. Against the postmodern and poststructural logic of intersectionality and Du Boisian double consciousness as articulated contemporarily in the discourses of postsegregation black scholars in the likes of Cornel West and Paul Gilroy to explain the constitution of black consciousness, we argue that the aforementioned are postindustrial bourgeois identity constructions or discourses. Concluding that where they exist, the majority of the divergences of black practical consciousnesses from the social class language game of the upper-class of white owners and high-level executives, in the two societies are, for the most part, class, and not racially or culturally, based.

Mass incarceration and the “new Jim Crow”: An interview with Michelle Alexander

Civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander is interviewed by Annie Stopford, a contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Professor Alexander’s first book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was published by the New Press in 2010 and was on The New York Times Best Seller List for ten consecutive months. Philosopher Cornel West has called The New Jim Crow the “secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first-century America.”

Racializing the Discourse of Adult Education

Adult education scholarship has been racialized through the lens of Eurocentric theory and research. Theoretical paradigms such as Africentrism struggle to gain academic legitimacy as discourses of transformative learning, critical thinking and self-direction - all grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition of the individual pursuit of rational self-knowledge - hold sway. This article reviews the way that repressive tolerance serves to broaden the field of adult education by including racially based perspectives on adult learning, yet simultaneously ensures that they are always seen as an exotic alternative to what is clearly the mainstream Eurocentric perspective. It reviews the way that discourses of criticality can be reinterpreted from the perspective of the African American lifeworld and explores in detail the work of Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. and Cornel West. Both scholars draw partly from the tradition of European critical theory in their attempts to use its central analytical categories (such as alienation, lifeworld, objectification and hegemony) to understand the African American experience. The piece ends with a consideration of how the dominant Eurocentric perspective in adult education can be critiques and challenged.

Love: A Letter To Ashley's Father

Love: A Letter To Ashley's Father

AAR Centennial Roundtable: Genres of Resistance, Tones of Intimacy, and Subtle Notes of Mercy

This article begins with a meditation on the roundtable's explicit comparative connection between economic bondage and human bondage, that is, between debt and slavery. I attempt to distinguish the two first, in order to see them more clearly in relation. First, I use Henry Adams' memoir as a way to narrate the “sentimental education” of the fledgling United States as a story of maturation, past slavery, and into vast economic wealth. Second, I utilize G. W. F. Hegel's famous dialectic of mastery and servitude, and its subtle gestures to the slave revolt in Haiti, to invite closer consideration of the often overlooked intimacy of the plantation system. I develop this point further with Melanie Pavich's historical work on two roughly contemporary women, one a plantation mistress and another a committed abolitionist. Finally, I use Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy as a way to illustrate the agonistic, painful, and even life-threatening nature of such intimacy. The purpose of this article was to reflect on the appropriate tone, and the most effective genres, with which to engage in discussions of such difficult topics. The work of Walter Kerr, Jeffrey Stout, and Cornel West possess great power and influence in that endeavor. Opal Moore's poetry serves for its expression.

Sinners Welcome: The Limits of Rhetorical Agency

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

Rebels Without a Pause: Hip‐hop and Resistance in the City

AbstractAt the outset of the 1970s, with the city of New York deep in financial crisis, the Bronx was the scene of violent conflict between rival gangs. In 1971, however, the South Bronx gangs came together to sign a truce. Afrika Bambaataa, a young warlord from the Black Spade gang, emerged as a peacemaker. In 1975 he created his own organization, the Universal Zulu Nation, which brought together the four components of hip‐hop culture (DJing, MCing, Bboying and graffiti). Bambaataa organized the first block parties, informal gatherings where DJs illegally ran sound systems off the municipal power supply. The block parties catalysed the South Bronx youth, for a time contributing to a more peaceful gang culture. Using the resistance paradigm, and Cornel West's substantial conception of cultural democracy, this essay questions whether hip‐hop engages and potentially challenges American democracy in creating an autonomous space for putting citizenship into practice. The essay concludes by arguing firstly that hip‐hop can be seen as a hidden transcript emerging from places of exclusion, and secondly that its diffusion is inscribed in struggles for space in the city.

Differentiation of Self and Social Justice Commitment Mediated by Hope

This study tested a theoretical model of hope mediating the relationship between differentiation of self and social justice commitment among graduate students (N = 202) in the helping professions. The theory was based primarily on the social justice philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West, and Paulo Freire using a cultural psychology approach. Results generally supported the theoretical model. Implications are considered for both training and future research on social justice.

Hope and positive religious coping as predictors of social justice commitment

The present study tested a theoretical model of dispositional hope and positive religious coping as unique predictors of social justice commitment over and above impression management in a sample of graduate students (N = 214) in helping professions at an Evangelical Protestant university in the USA. This empirical study utilised a cultural psychology approach with a theoretical framework developed from (a) an earlier cultural psychology study of hope and social justice using the social philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr, Cornel West, and Paulo Freire and (b) several liberation and Pietistic theologians. Results supported the discriminant validity hypothesis with dispositional hope and positive religious coping each predicting social justice commitment over and above a measure of spiritual impression management. Implications are considered for contextually sensitive training and future empirical and interdisciplinary research on social justice commitment.

A Westian Vision of the Role of Black Philosophy

The role of black philosophy? I believe Bro. Cornel West pointed us down the right path. In 1977 he wrote: “Afro-American philosophy is the interpretation of AfroAmerican history, highlighting the cultural heritage and political struggles, which provides desirable norms that should regulate responses to particular challenges presently confronting Afro-Americans.”1 Where he spoke of “Afro-American philosophy,” I would speak of Africana philosophy, a term I will treat as interchangeable with “black philosophy.”2 In what follows, I will use West’s defi nition to build a vision of the role of Africana philosophy in the intellectual life of the black world. I will also provide an example of what I would see as the fruitful development of the fi eld by briefl y exploring the prospects for increased work on the topic of Pan-Africanism. I would defi ne philosophy in a general sense as the activity of raising and trying to answer, in a refl ective and critical fashion, fundamental questions about the nature and value of things, about how we gain knowledge, and about how we ought to live our lives. Africana philosophy in the broadest possible sense is, on this defi nition, immeasurably old, as I see no reason to doubt that this activity has been carried out by people on the African continent for as long as our species has possessed the linguistic and cognitive capacities we associate with being human. Ancient Egyptian thought serves, I believe, as the initiating source of Africana philosophy as a historically ascertainable tradition, given the diffi culty of measuring the age of sources in the oral tradition.3 In the modern era, as Africans and African descendants confronted the slave trade, slavery, segregation, and colonization, Africana philosophizing developed a strong sociopolitical focus. The modern period also brings us the fi rst black professional philosophers, people like Anton Wilhelm Amo, from what is now Ghana, who received the equivalent of a doctorate in philosophy in Germany in 1730, and Thomas Nelson Baker, who became the fi rst African American in the United States to receive a PhD in philosophy in 1903.4 I shall concentrate here on Africana philosophy as a professional enterprise, that is, on the work of trained philosophers. I should explain right away, though, that I do not take all work in philosophy by black professional philosophers to count as black philosophy. I count only work that is distinctively Africana, in the sense that it is concerned with issues arising out of the black experience and/or it participates in a philosophical tradition associated primarily with black people.5 Works by black philosophers

Improvisation as Democratic Virtue A Deweyan Possibility for African American Religion and Ethics

Abstract This article explores the reception of John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism by scholars in African American religion and ethics and argues that Dewey's usefulness in these disciplines has not yet run dry. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. have drawn on Dewey's work to inform their scholarship on black religion. In response to Glaude's account of “post-soul politics” (by which he means the contemporary political struggle for racial justice, which is frustrated by excessive deference to the civil rights and black power movements), I suggest that cultivating a virtue of improvisation can facilitate democratic progress. Drawing on Dewey and Ralph Ellison to imagine such a virtue, I argue that improvisation could help democratic moral agents respond well to contemporary crises such as the mass incarceration of black men. I conclude that resources are available in black communities for democratic Christians to use in the struggle against racial injustice.

Sherman A. Jackson and the Possibility of a “Blackamerican Muslim” Prophetic Pragmatism

In this paper, I argue that in his endeavor to reorient Muslim American priorities and perceptions of authority in the name of a “Blackamerican Islam,” Sherman A. Jackson's conception of “protest appropriation” and its concomitant blending of epistemological and social critique informed by the experience of black suffering stands in the tradition of African American forms of pragmatism, especially that of Cornel West. Just as West's “prophetic pragmatism” enabled him to develop a religious tradition of social criticism informed by Christian elements and the experiences of African Americans, so too does Jackson's “Blackamerican Islam” evince certain pragmatic sensibilities in its quest to do the same for Sunni Islam in the face of white and immigrant Muslim ideologies. In the process of making this argument, I hope to make distinct the harmonies and dissonances between Jackson's and West's work, and thus better ascertain the possibility of a “Blackamerican Muslim” prophetic pragmatism.

No Safe Space: James Arnt Aune and the Controversial Classroom

No Safe Space:James Arnt Aune and the Controversial Classroom Paul Stob (bio) In a 2004 essay in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, James Arnt Aune described a provocative exchange that took place in his senior-level Religious Communication class at Texas A&M University. The issue at hand was gay marriage, and Aune's students, who were overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, asked him "the Jewish view of homosexuality, as if there truly could be such a thing."1 Aune launched into an animated discussion of the problems of textual interpretation in the Jewish tradition, the variety of possible readings of the Torah, and the difficulties of applying an ancient oral tradition to current practices. He also explained how one could obey the letter of the Torah "simply by engaging in mutual masturbation or fellatio and avoiding anal intercourse (as in fact many Orthodox Jewish gay men do currently)."2 At the end of the discussion, "my students seemed quite shocked," Aune reported. They were particularly shocked at his "legalistic" approach the Old Testament, which seemed like casuistic stretching of a sacred text.3 Those of us who had the opportunity to sit in Aune's classrooms can likely remember similar instances—times when Aune, flushed with color, challenged the presumptions of his students, spoke in ways that made them uncomfortable, and ultimately helped them see an issue from a new perspective. "Classrooms should be unsafe spaces," Aune routinely told his [End Page 555] students, and for more than 30 years, at institutions across the country, he demonstrated the intellectual value of this maxim. At Tulane, Virginia, Iowa, St. Olaf, St. Thomas, Penn State, and Texas A&M, he forced students to rethink received wisdom. As one of his former students recalls, Aune knew full well that "intellectually unsafe and challenging classrooms are the most productive."4 At the same time, however, he knew how to use conflict, debate, argument, controversy, and offensive ideas to connect with his students. His ire "was always directed toward the end of knowledge—which he had in abundance and which he imparted in abundance. It was never threatening even if it was sometimes couched in vehemence."5 From 2002 to 2004, I was fortunate enough to sit in some of Jim Aune's classrooms and witness his ire and vehemence come together in moments of profound pedagogy. During those years, as I completed my master's degree under Aune's direction, Aune shaped my life and career in more ways than I can explain. He was simultaneously my teacher, mentor, critic, companion, confidant, sounding board, advisor, editor, book recommender, and friend. My memories of these years remain vivid. I recall, for example, flopping down in Jim's office shortly after arriving in College Station to discuss pragmatism, Marxism, and Cornel West—whose name I mistakenly pronounced as "Colonel" West, prompting Jim to burst into hysterics. I recall standing on the stairs of Bolton Hall, which housed the Department of Speech Communication, as Jim smoked cigarettes and chatted with me about everything from Diet Coke to Foucault, who, we both agreed, seemed a little too pessimistic about life and social change. I recall insisting that Jim watch South Park because it was a brilliant form of cultural critique and not the pointless drivel he had been led to believe. I also recall giving Jim a copy of my grandfather's doctoral dissertation—an analysis, written in German, of Max Weber's religious sociology—because Jim was one of the few people I knew who enjoyed reading old theological works in German. Above all, I recall my time in the classroom with Jim. At Texas A&M I took three formal classes with him—Rhetorical Perspectives in Communication, Modern Rhetorical Theories, and Freedom of Speech—in addition to two independent studies. In each class he demonstrated the intellectually generative potential of controversy, criticism, uncomfortable thoughts, and offensive ideas. Jim firmly believed, following the Jewish tradition, that "argument itself" was "a sacred activity."6 He detested the idea that any topic, claim, or discourse was somehow above the realm of argument, [End Page 556] somehow beyond "democratic discussion and debate."7 Whatever shyness or reticence he may have shown in...