Black is a Country by Nikhil Pal Singh
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognised as central to the history of black struggle. It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality. Finding racism hidden within the universalising tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate scepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and the founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program. Singh is the editor of Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell and the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, winner of the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780674013001 |
| ISBN 10 | 067401300X |
| Title | Black is a Country |
| Author | Nikhil Pal Singh |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
| Year published | 2004-05-31 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |