Black Prophetic Fire by Cornel West

Black Prophetic Fire by Cornel West

An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines.

West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even Santaclausified Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X's radical spirit and fearless speech, but has often become the victim of public amnesia.

By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire so essential in the age of Obama.

Christa Buschendorf holds the Chair of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her scholarship focuses on transatlantic intellectual history and on a project exploring the approach of figurational and relational sociology in (African) American Studies. She is the author of Mit Kinderaugen: Zur Perspektivtechnik bei William Faulkner, Carson McCullers und Flannery O'Connor (Wurzburg, 1988), and The High Priest of Pessimism: Zur Rezeption Schopenhauers in den USA (Heidelberg, 2008). Astrid Franke is Professor of American Studies at the Eberhard Karls-Universitat Tubingen, Germany. She received her PhD from the John F. Kennedy-Institute at the Freie Universitat Berlin and then became an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main. Among her publications are Keys to Controversies: Stereotypes in Modern American Novels (New York, 1999), and Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (Heidelberg, 2010). Johannes Voelz is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He received his PhD from the John F. Kennedy-Institute at the Freie Universitat Berlin in 2008. He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge (Hanover, New Hampshire, 2010), and co-editor of a collection of essays by Winfried Fluck, titled Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies (Heidelberg, 2009).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807003527
ISBN 10	0807003522
Title	Black Prophetic Fire
Author	Cornel West
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Beacon Press
Year published	2014-10-07
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.