Routledge Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought

Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking. Making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. This volume moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life. This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation. About the Author Adolph Reed, Jr. is professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches American and Afro-American politics and political thought, urban politics, and American political development. He is the author or coauthor of six books including Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and the Retreat from Racial Equality (Westview Press 2001) and W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (Oxford University Press 1997), the latter of which was awarded the National Conference of Black Political Scientists' 1998 Outstanding Book Award. Kenneth W. Warren is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He teaches courses that reflect his interest in genre, the politics of race, and the relation of culture to politics. He is the author of two books, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (University of Chicago Press 1993) and So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (University of Chicago Press 2003) and has written numerous articles in publications including American Literary History, boundary 2, and New Literary History.