African American Political Thought And American Culture Hardcover

India

Alex Zamalin

This book demonstrates how certain African American writers radically re-envisioned core American ideals in order to make them serviceable for racial justice. Each writer's unprecedented reconstruction of key American values has the potential to energize American citizenship today.

1137528095

9781137528094

English

Palgrave MacMillan

06 Oct 2015

Alex Zamalin is Director of African American studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Detroit-Mercy, USA. He was a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University, USA. His research explores American political thought, African American political thought, and racial politics. He teaches courses in political theory and American politics.

For too long 'white' American political theory has reigned unopposed, in a tradition from Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls either overtly racist or at best race-evasive, despite (or maybe because of?) the centrality of race to the construction of the US polity. In this valuable contribution to a growing body of work rediscovering and reclaiming an oppositional African American tradition, Alex Zamalin shows how the fiction and essays of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison can be read as a bold political challenge to this white evasion of the responsibility of dealing with racial injustice and a mapping of a new emancipatory vision for all Americans. - Charles W. Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University, USA