W

WEST, CORNEL (1953-) As a leading African-American academic philosopher, public intellectual and social critic, Cornel West deliberately equates his own work with that of earlier American public thinkers/activists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. As a philosopher, West writes in the Socratic mode of inquiry and open scepticism; his work openly displays a huge range of in uences, including Marxist materialism, Christian ethics and American pragmatism. West’s writing can seem self-contradictory and inconclusive at times, but that is the point; for example, in The Future of the Race (1996) West writes of Du Bois’ ‘intellectual defects’ but also of his ‘broad shoulders’, upon whom West and others stand. A key element of West’s work is a determination to connect African-American culture with other cultures, most speci cally Russian and (often controversially) Jewish culture. In his most powerful essays, West evokes the force of Hegelian Enlightenment thinking, Nietzschean post-Enlightenment thinking, the absurdism of Kafka and Beckett, and straightforward political activism: for the reader, this can often be exhilarating and an impetus to new ways of thinking about a problem/idea. West has written over 20 books, and his most important essays have been collected in The Cornel West Reader (1999). Some significant essays are ‘Race and Modernity’, ‘Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization’, ‘Race and Social Theory’ and ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’. [KH]

See also Chapter 12.