Studies in a Dying Culture

Bradley, Adam. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From “Invisible Man” to “Three Days Before the Shooting”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. viii, 244 pp. In 1999, an abbreviated selection from Ralph Ellison’s notoriously unfinished second novel was published. [1] Last year, a more extensive version, based on the entire extant corpus, was published, co-edited by [...]

This obituary appeared this year: Margaret Burroughs: Co-founder of DuSable Museum, prominent artist By Kristen Schorsch, Chicago Tribune “She started Chicago’s renowned African American history museum in her living room nearly 50 years ago” Commemorating another milestone in black achievement and saying farewell to one of the greats . . .

I began July by taking A Right To Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003) out of the library. (How I envy that title!) This collection repeats some of the strips published in The Boondocks: Because I Know You Don’t Read the Newspapers, but I did not mind having my memory [...]

A year ago June I began an interest in Aaron McGruder’s work with a graphic novel he co-authored, Birth of a Nation. Sensing something contradictory in McGruder’s approach, I wrote a critique which remains unpublished, as I wasn’t satisfied with my exposition. I then turned to his comic strip The Boondocks—which I had missed out [...]

Cornel West, Marxism & morality West, Cornel. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991. West wrote this in the late 1970s, before he became a star. The exposition of the development of the Young Marx is good. He presents interesting information on Engels, Kautsky, and Lukàcs, but his thesis contrasting [...]

Mid-April through the first week of May proved to be a fertile Esperanto period. I translated Blake’s "The Birds" into Esperanto and put several other author’s pieces on my web site. I revisited one of my favorite Esperanto short-story volumes, Vitralo, by John I. Francis, and put "La Klera Despoto" [The Cultured Despot] online. I [...]

[Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts, Chapter One] Achieving Our Country, Achieving Our World: Baldwin, Rorty, and Social Hope Judith M. Green, Fordham University If anything shows up the ideological nature and ultimate uselessness of pragmatism, this review does, first, by exposing the selective attention, nostalgia, myth-making and wish-fulfillment upon which Rorty’s social vision rests, and [...]

27 March 2007: Glaude: He is a professor of religion at Princeton University, “with research interests that include African American religious history and its place in American public life. Glaude was mentored by Dr. Cornel West as a Princeton grad student and has written/edited several books. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics [...]

I wrote this on 15 January 2007, Martin Luther King’s birthday: Tavis Smiley interviews Cornel West, Jan 12, 2007 Cornel blurbs Tavis: I think that when it comes to mass media, this particular show enacts the legacy because what you have been able to do, Tavis. The reason why I believe you’re the most brilliant [...]

“. . . the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now [...]