Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:59:39.260Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“A FIGURE OF OUR TIMES”

An Interview with Cornel West on W. E. B. Du Bois1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2013

Christa Buschendorf*
Affiliation:
Department of American Studies and Center for North American Research, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
Cornel West
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University; Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York
*
Professor Christa Buschendorf, Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Grueneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Extract

This interview is part of a larger project on the Black prophetic tradition and its impact on today's ongoing struggle for justice and equality. We are concerned with the special challenges facing Black public intellectuals and activists, particularly with the impediments deriving from their position as outsiders in society; we consider the philosophical and political voices that helped form their own thinking as well as the social conditions that shaped them; and we reflect on the role of religion in their lives and its specific function in the Black community.2

Type
State of the Discourse
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This interview was recorded in August, 2010.

References

REFERENCES

Benjamin, Walter (1968). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Arendt, Hannah (Ed.), Illuminations, pp. 255266. Zohn, Harry (Trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.Google Scholar
Bien, Peter (Ed.) (2012). The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Blum, Edward J. (2007). W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Broch, Hermann (1945). The Death of Virgil. Untermeyer, Jean Starr (Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Buschendorf, Christa (2011). ‘We need Martin more than ever’: Interview with Cornel West on Martin Luther King, Jr., August 2011. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 56(3): 450467.Google Scholar
Diggs Colbert, Soyica (2011). The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1899). The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Publications of the University of Pennsylvania. Series in political economy and public law, no.14. Boston, MA: Ginn & Co.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1903] 2003). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1915). The Negro. New York: Holt.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1920] 2004). Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Washington Square Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1924). The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Boston, MA: Stratford Co.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). Criteria of Negro Art. The Crisis 32 (October), 290297.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Russell and Russell.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1939). Black Folk: Then and Now; An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Octagon Books.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1940] 2007a). Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. ([1946] 2007b). The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1954). Letter to George Padmore, December 10, 1954. In Aptheker, Herbert (Ed.), The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. III. Selections, 1944–1963, pp. 374375. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1968). Autobiography of W. E. B. Dubois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1970). The Revelation of Saint Orgne, the Damned. In Foner, Philip S. (Ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920–1963, pp. 100123. New York: Pathfinder.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1977). Book Reviews by W. E. B. Du Bois. Aptheker, Herbert (Ed.). Millwood, NY: KTO Press.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and West, Cornel (1997). The Future of the Race. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Graham Du Bois, Shirley (1971). His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Lippincott.Google Scholar
Horne, Gerald (1986). Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1946] 1952). Zorba the Greek. Wildman, Carl (Trans.). London: J. Lehmann.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1948] 1954). The Greek Passion. Griffin, Jonathan (Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1938] 1958). The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. Friar, Kimon (Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1951] 1960). The Last Temptation of Christ. Bien, P. A. (Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1954] 1962). Saint Francis, A Novel. Bien, P. A. (Trans.). New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos ([1941–1943] 1983). Buddha. San Diego, CA: Avant Books.Google Scholar
Kazantzakis, Nikos (1989). Russia: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution. Antonakes, Michael and Maskaleris, Thanasis (Trans.). Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co.Google Scholar
King, Martin Luther Jr. (1970). Honoring Dr. Du Bois. In Clarke, John Henrik, Jackson, Esther, Kaiser, Ernest, and O'Dell, J. H. (Eds.), Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 176183. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Rabaka, Reiland (Ed.) (2010a). W. E. B. Du Bois. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Rabaka, Reiland (2010b). Against Epistemic Apartheid: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology. Boulder, CO: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Saint-Arnaud, Pierre ([2003] 2009). African American Pioneers of Sociology: A Critical History. Feldstein, Peter (Trans.). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
West, Cornel (1989). The Evasion of American Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, Cornel (1997). Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization. In Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and West, Cornel (Eds.), The Future of the Race, pp. 53114. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
West, Cornel (1999). The Cornel West Reader. New York: Civitas.Google Scholar
West, Cornel (2004). Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Wortham, Robert A. (2005). Du Bois and the Sociology of Religion: Rediscovering a Founding Figure. Sociological Inquiry, 75(4): 433452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Robert A. (2009a). W. E. B. Du Bois, the Black Church, and the Sociological Study of Religion. Sociological Spectrum, 29(2): 144172.Google Scholar
Wortham, Robert A. (2009b). W. E. B. Du Bois and the Scientific Study of Society: 1897–1914. In Wortham, Robert A., (Ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociological Imagination: A Reader, 1897–1914, pp. 120. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard (1941). 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard (1945). Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Brothers.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard (1954). Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, Phil (Ed.) (2004). The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois. Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar