Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America

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Psychology Press, 1993 - 319 pages
In Keeping Faith, Cornel West - author of the bestselling Race Matters - puts forward his ideas about race and about philosophy. West's powerful voice ranges widely across issues of race and culture, the role of the black intellectual, politics and philosophy in America, art and architecture, questions of legal theory, and the future of liberal thought. In a time of decay and discouragement in the black community and among progressive forces at large, Keeping Faith offers new strategies to galvanize and propel a new generation of African Americans. Yet, West argues, racial subordination must be understood within the larger crises of our society. Maintaining the uniqueness of black identity and resistance, he provocatively suggests alliances with other intellectual and community-based forms of American radicalism. Keeping Faith offers West's distinctive mix of political passions and careful scrutiny. Whether exploring 'the new cultural politics of difference', American pragmatism, or race and social theory, he sustains a difficult balance between a subtly argued critique of the past and present, and a broadly conceived, daring vision of the future. Both troubling and exhilarating, Keeping Faith maps not only the concerns of one of the most significant public intellectuals of our time, but issues crucial to Americans of all races.
 

Contents

The New Cultural Politics of Difference
3
Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation
33
A Note on Race and Architecture
45
Horace Pippins Challenge to Art Criticism
55
The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual
67
Philosophy and Political Engagement
87
Theory Pragmatisms and Politics
89
Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic
107
Fredric Jamesons American Marxism
165
Reassessing the Critical Legal Studies Movement
195
Critical Legal Studies and a Liberal Critic
207
Movement
227
The Role of Law in Progressive Politics
235
Race and Social Theory
251
The Paradox of the African American Rebellion
271
Notes
293

The Historicist Turn in Philosophy of Religion
119
The Limits of Neopragmatism
135
On Georg Lukács
143

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About the author (1993)

Professor, writer, and civil rights activist Cornel West was born on June 2, 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Sacramento. He graduated from Harvard University in 1973 with an M.A. and later taught African-American studies there. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Haverford College, and Princeton University, the latter as professor of religion and director of African-American studies. West earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980. He has written more than twenty books, including Race Matters and Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America.

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