[In the following essay, Gooding-Williams examines West's concept of “prophetic pragmatism,” its associations with the pragmatist tradition, West's reading of W. E. B. DuBois, and the problematic significance of West's “universal moral discourse.”]

Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism is a rhetorically compelling history of American pragmatism that reconstructs, promotes, and purports to extend what West characterizes as pragmatism’s “evasion of philosophy.” Taking his cue from Richard Rorty’s interpretation of modern (post-Cartesian) European philosophy as a fruitless quest after secure epistemic foundations, West discovers in the American pragmatist tradition a sustained and persistently provocative refusal of that quest, a repudiation of epistemological preoccupations that subordinates knowledge to power and treats “thought as a weapon to enable … effective action.”¹ Though West disputes Rorty’s view of Dewey (for West, “the greatest of the American pragmatists”), shuns Rorty’s pragmatism without consequences and, like many of Rorty’s critics on the left, insists fervently on the relevance of social theory to politics, his notion of what it is to evade the Cartesian philosophical heritage derives directly from Rorty’s reading of modern philosophy.² Beginning where this reading ends, West constructs a history of American pragmatism that, after critically subsuming the legacy of evasion which links Rorty to Emerson, reaches its culmination in West’s elaboration of his own culturally critical and politically engaged “prophetic pragmatism.”³

By presenting prophetic pragmatism as the central theme of his final chapter, West alerts his readers to at least two of the intentions which shape his treatment of his pragmatist predecessors. On one hand, West wants to show that American pragmatism is a developing tradition whose highpoint is his own revision of that tradition. Here, his aim is quite simply to describe the history of American pragmatism up to and including the moment of his writing. On the other hand, West wants to portray and promote an image of himself as a pragmatist; he wants, in other words, to elaborate a public persona that is fully consonant with his claim that his voice and his writing constitute the most recent stage in the historical evolution of American pragmatist philosophy. It is obvious, I think, that these intentions not only complement but mutually implicate each other. Thus, they stand or fall together. In what follows, I will argue that, in fact, they fall together, though in a significant and interesting way that, construed generously, provides me a compelling pragmatic reason to turn my discussion from West’s historiographical intentions to his political and prophetic ambitions. I will conclude my discussion by sketching a critique of these ambitions that, despite its negative implications, hopes ultimately to remain in solidarity with the leftist and black freedom fighting commitments they articulate.

EVADING GENEALOGY, EVADING EMERSON

Organic metaphors dominate the rhetoric of West’s narrative history of American pragmatism. In general, the effect of these metaphors is to characterize the pragmatist tradition as a vital and evolving potency that draws its seminal “sentiments” and “sensibilities” from the “crucible” of Emerson’s original evasion of philosophy, that “comes-of-age” and reaches “maturity” in “the towering force” of John Dewey, that is “kept alive” by James and Pierce, by its mid-century proponents, and then again by those “lonely laborers in the vineyard” who tend caringly to it when it “wanes” and “declines” in the heyday of logical positivism, that achieves a dramatic “resurgence” in the writings of Richard Rorty, that thrusts down “roots” of sufficient sustenance to feed West himself no less than the great DuBois, and that will, if West has his way, “reinvigorate” our “decadent cultural life,” spawn a “flowering” of personalities, and engender a “flourishing” of democracy.⁴ In West’s narrative, in other words, American pragmatism appears figuratively as a developing organism. To be sure, this organism admits of a high degree of differentiation, as in the course of its development it grows a variety of distinct and distinctive parts with names like “James,” “Dewey,” “DuBois,” “Rorty,” “West,” etc. But since each of these parts is a part of one and the same organism, each is, West’s rhetoric suggests, despite the creative and revisionary impulse it expresses, bound to the others by one and the same vital potency, a virile force named “Emerson.”⁵ Indeed, it is West’s rhetorical repetition of the name “Emerson,” insistently reiterated in every chapter of his narrative and singularly assigned to the gnarly and erect treetrunk which the cover of his book figures as the life-sustaining origin of the entire pragmatist tradition, that more than any of the rhetorical strategies he otherwise deploys encourages his readers to conceptualize the pragmatist tradition as deriving its unity from a single vital potency.

By figuring the pragmatist tradition as a developing organism, West promotes his two intentions to describe American pragmatism as a developing tradition that culminates in prophetic pragmatism and to portray prophetic pragmatism (West’s pragmatism) as the most recent stage in the development of American pragmatism. To be more precise, West’s rhetoric of a developing organism constitutes the primary linguistic and conceptual means he uses to represent American pragmatism as a developing tradition, and thus to persuade his readers that his two intentions pertain, in fact and not merely in fancy, to a developing tradition. That West should rely in this way on an organic model of history is puzzling, however, because this model contradicts the conception of genealogy he advocates. In The American Evasion of Philosophy, no less than in his first book, Prophesy Deliverance, West purports to subscribe to a conception of genealogy that, not withstanding his own emphasis on human agency and moral discourse, he explicitly associates with Nietzsche and Foucault.⁶ The paradox here is that Nietzsche and Foucault deliberately intend the conception of genealogy they advocate as a critique of organic models of history of the sort that West rhetorically propagates. For both these writers “genealogy” signifies a mode of historiography that accents rupture and the radical reconstitution of meaning, and so purports to unmask the illusion that the history of a custom, an institution, or an intellectual tradition can be properly conceived as the unfolding or development of a single meaning present in the origin of that custom, institution, or tradition. Both, in other words, treat historical “sign-chains” as sequences of fundamentally different and disparate meanings, rather than as evidence of the continuing and still potent force of one original meaning.⁷ Thus, from a Nietzschean and Foucauldian perspective, one might suspect that West’s narrative genealogy of pragmatism, so far as it rhetorically implies that the history of pragmatism (despite, again, all the “creative revisions” that affect that history) is the differentiated development over time of a single patriarchal potency named “Emerson,” is a misleading example of genealogy in which the myth of organic totality has been enlisted to disguise deep and ultimately incommensurable intellectual differences.

The paradox of West’s attempt to relate his rhetoric of historical development to Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s notions of genealogy has a parallel in his very insistence on a rhetoric that construes a specifically Emersonian intellectual tradition in organic terms. Commenting on Emerson’s statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive,” West attributes to Emerson the Wittgensteinian belief that words are “enabling tactics, useful devices” (West, AE, p. 36). Though this attribution is fine, so far as it goes, it does not go as far as one might like. Indeed, where West ends his discussion of Emerson’s view of language is, as West himself remarks in an admiring footnote, precisely where Richard Poirier begins to elaborate a rather detailed account of Emerson’s preoccupation with the transitive power of language.⁸ Central to this account is the recognition that for Emerson, as well as for James, words function not simply as tactics, but as self-referential tactics, that is, as tropings and turnings of their very own meanings, which tropings and turnings disrupt the appearance of semantic coherence which the hermeneutic assumption of organic unity tends to reify. An obvious characteristic of a literary text, says Poirier, echoing Emerson, “is that its words tend to destabilize each other and to fall into conflicted or contradictory relationships.”⁹

Poirier’s Emerson is a pragmatist whose views of the way language works provide strong reasons to question those readings of texts and groups of texts that, losing sight of the instability of literary and perhaps all language, read “through” language in order to discover well-defined organic unities.¹⁰ If this Emerson is West’s Emerson, then West’s use of the trope “Emerson” to represent American pragmatism as a developing organism is, besides being paradoxical, all but impossible to read as a pragmatist gesture (even a prophetically pragmatist gesture) deriving its substance from Emerson.

If West’s narrative of American pragmatism cannot avoid an air of paradox in aligning itself with Foucault and Emerson, it can claim nevertheless to be warranted by the texts it interprets. To put the same point a bit differently, my analysis and estimation of West’s appeal to Foucault and of his claim to write in the spirit of Emerson stops short of a Foucauldian or Emersonian critique of his historical narrative, and so leaves the integrity of that narrative intact. In the next section of this essay I will gesture in the direction of such a critique, taking my cue more from Emerson and Poirier’s interpretation of Emerson than from Foucault. In particular, I will attempt to show how a careful consideration of verbal detail and conceptual nuance works to disrupt West’s rhetorical construction of American pragmatism as a developing organic whole. In pursuing this point, I shall limit myself to discussing West’s treatment of just one of the many writers he reads and interprets, namely, W.E.B. DuBois. Despite this limitation, I hope to be able to draw some general conclusions regarding the narrative deployment of organic models of genealogy and to clarify further the interdependence of West’s interrelated intentions to tell a story about American pragmatism and to create a persona proper to the conclusion of that story.

EVADING DUBOIS

Was DuBois a pragmatist? West answers this question in the affirmative by characterizing DuBois as a “Mid-Century Pragmatic Intellectual” and then, more specifically, as a “Jamesian Organic Intellectual” (West, AE, table of contents). West’s treatment of DuBois appears exactly halfway through a chapter entitled “The Dilemma of the Mid-Century Pragmatic Intellectual” and, moreover, at precisely the midpoint of his history of American pragmatism. (Here, I am presupposing West’s distinction in his table of contents between the history of American pragmatism and its pre-history.)

According to West, DuBois, like his fellow mid-century pragmatic intellectuals (i.e., Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling) follows in the wake of the “giant” of American pragmatism, John Dewey, whose “grand breakthrough … is not only that he considers … larger social structures, systems, and institutions, but also that he puts them at the center of his pragmatic thought without surrendering his allegiance to Emersonian and Jamesian concerns with individuality and personality” (West, AE, p. 70). Most important among the issues confronting these mid-century intellectuals is, claims West, the question of “how to keep alive the intellectual and political possibility of an Emersonian culture of creative democracy in a world of shrinking options” (West, AE, p. 114). With the exception of Trilling, who patricidally repudiates the legacy of Emerson, each of these figures succeeds in preserving the vital force of the Emersonian theodicy and so in keeping that force from dying, despite the “new challenges” which threaten it in the “new wilderness” of an America that has come of age (West, AE, p. 111).

West does not hesitate to invoke the rhetoric of organic development in order to justify DuBois’ presence in his narrative. DuBois, he claims, in the very first paragraph of his exposition, was “grounded in and nourished by American pragmatism” (West, AE, p. 138). What West has in mind in making this assertion is, we later discover, DuBois’ claim in his Autobiography that “William James guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism … it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bushnell Hart with his research method, that turned me back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophical speculation, to the social sciences as the field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro” (quoted in West, AE, p. 139).

This often cited passage from DuBois seems perhaps not only to support West’s characterization of DuBois as “grounded in and nourished by American pragmatism,” but to warrant too his representation of DuBois as a Jamesian intellectual. Yet, as West well knows, DuBois’ biographical remark hardly justifies West’s or, for that matter, any interpretation of DuBois’ writings as pragmatist and/or Jamesian. Neither, moreover, does it establish that DuBois’ turn from philosophy was an evasion of philosophy in West’s well-defined Emersonian and Jamesian sense of “evasion.” Aware, I presume, of this second difficulty, West writes that “DuBois never spelled out what he meant by the ‘sterilities of scholastic philosophy,’ but given what we know of James’ pragmatism, it surely had something to do with sidestepping the Cartesian epistemological puzzles of modern philosophy” (emphasis added) (West, AE, p. 140). West’s rhetorical reliance here on the intensive adverb “surely,” precisely because this adverb functions in his sentence to plead agreement in the absence of a convincing argument based on DuBois’ writings, reveals immediately his failure to justify his representation of DuBois as intending to evade epistemology. To be sure, it serves West’s narrative wishes to imagine that DuBois, in turning from philosophy to the social sciences, was attempting in the spirit of Pierce and James to evade a specifically Cartesian epistemological problematic. But what West imagines and, presumably, hopes to persuade us to believe, he never substantiates.

West’s presentation of textual evidence, as distinct from psychological conjecture, to justify the inclusion of DuBois in a narrative history of American pragmatism focuses on two of DuBois’ writings, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). His argument regarding Souls focuses in particular on the following and very famous passage occurring in the book’s first chapter:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the old selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes it to be possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving; to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.¹¹

After arguing that “DuBois subverts the Emersonian theodicy by situating it within an imperialist and ethnocentric rhetorical and political context,” West asserts that “ironically, DuBois’ subversion is aided by his own revision of the Emersonian theodicy” and, glossing the above quoted passage, adds that “the aim remains self-creation and individuality, though with a more colorful diversity; the end is still a culture in which human powers, provoked by problems, are expanded for the sake of moral development of personalities” (emphasis added) (West, AE, p. 143).

Perhaps the first thing to notice about West’s reading of DuBois’ comments regarding “The history of the American Negro …” is that he is here trying to link DuBois to the pragmatist tradition, no longer by way of James, but by way of Emerson. If DuBois is a pragmatist, it is not only because he followed James in sidestepping Cartesian epistemology, but because despite his subversions and revisions he sustains and continues the Emersonian theodicy. And though West’s reading of DuBois as an Emersonian is more compelling than his intimations that DuBois’ writings and/or turn from philosophy were driven by a Jamesian aversion to the Cartesian quest for certain knowledge, it is, for a number of reasons, not finally persuasive.

First among these is that DuBois, in the passage on which West focuses, is not expounding an Emersonian concept of self-creation—West’s suggestion to the contrary notwithstanding. It is true, of course, that DuBois speaks of a longing to attain self-conscious manhood that would entail a merging of his double self into something better and truer. Read, however, in view of the paragraph which directly precedes this statement of longing (a paragraph that West himself quotes, in order to justify his belief that DuBois subverts the Emersonian theodicy), DuBois’ reference to the merging of a double self seems to pertain less to the possibility of creating a new self than to that of seeing one’s old self or selves in a new, more comprehensive and truer light (DuBois’ claim that the Negro “wishes neither of the old selves to be lost” supports this reading). In this paragraph, DuBois intimates that the Negro’s yearning for self-consciousness is a yearning for a “true self-consciousness” (emphasis mine) that would let him see himself, not through the alienating mediation of a veil, but as he truly is. Thus, he implies that self-revelation (which he distinguishes from that “revelation of the other world” which his ironic play on words suggests is a persistent veiling and re-veiling of the self), as distinct from self-creation, is the telos of the Negro’s striving for self-conscious manhood. For DuBois, the American Negro is driven not by an Emersonian impulse to reinvent himself but by a desire to look beyond a shroud of prejudice that, like a funhouse mirror, keeps him prisoner to an image of himself that never “merges” with his undistorted reflection.¹²

My second objection to West’s discussion of Souls pertains to his suggestion that DuBois, in the lengthy passage quoted above, is thematizing the topic of individuality (or of individual personality). This suggestion is quite problematic, if only because, once again, the context established by the preceding paragraph argues powerfully for a very different interpretation. DuBois’ reference in this paragraph to the Negro as a “sort of seventh son” follows a listing of six other peoples. As Joel Williamson has so usefully recognized, this listing of the “Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian” straightforwardly reiterates Hegel’s enumeration in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History of the six world-historical peoples through whose histories the world-spirit achieves self-realization. DuBois’ discussion of the American Negro revises Hegel’s philosophy of history, first, by transporting the Hegelian dialectic into North America, and second, by bringing the “message” of Africa, which Hegel relegates to the nonnarratable “threshold” (Schwelle) of historical time and development, into the drama of the world’s history.¹³ Thus, when DuBois speaks of “The history of the American Negro” and claims “that Negro blood has a message for the world,” he is speaking neither of individuals nor of aggregates of individuals but about the Negro race as corporate entity with a world-historical destiny. Needless to say, I am not suggesting here that DuBois, who celebrates passionately “that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect,” values peoples more than individuals; rather I would argue that the individualism of Souls, however it enters into DuBois’ text, has to be understood against the background of DuBois’ attempt there to elaborate a philosophy of history of Hegelian provenance and, therefore, that the rhetoric of individualism in Souls is a complicated phenomenon that neither simply nor straightforwardly comports with a specifically Emersonian conception of individuality.¹⁴

Echoes of Hegel’s thought are present not only in DuBois’ sketch of a philosophy of history, or in the more generally romantic figure which I analyzed above of a true self-consciousness that comprehends inner division (here, DuBois follows Hegel in tying the development of the truth of self-consciousness to that process of preserving and comprehending contradictions that Hegel describes as the Aufhebung of self-consciousness), but in the very language DuBois uses to characterize what he calls “the end of the Negro’s striving.”¹⁵ To be more precise, the words and concepts DuBois deploys to describe this end are all but identical to the words and concepts which Josiah Royce uses when, in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, he explicates by means of an analogy to “social life” Hegel’s interpretation in the Phenomenology of Spirit of self-consciousness as a struggle for recognition (Anerkennung).¹⁶ For Royce, the essence of this struggle is “a conscious appeal to others to respect my right and worth” that, if it fails, leaves self-consciousness “isolated” and destined to “rot away,” stripped of its identity as “brother, companion (and) co-worker.”¹⁷ DuBois’ belief that the Negro’s striving for self-consciousness and self-revelation is also an endeavor “to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation” (emphasis mine), not only recapitulates the conceptual and rhetorical dichotomies shaping Royce’s discussion of Hegel, but shows too how DuBois, in keeping with the spirit of this discussion, construes the human and Negro struggle for respect and recognition as a conscious appeal to others for social inclusion.

Now it is worth mentioning here that Royce himself was, if not strictly an Hegelian, then a post-Kantian idealist who sustained an intense interest in Hegel’s philosophy throughout the 1890’s (from 1889–1898, Royce’s seminar on metaphysics focused on Hegel, giving special attention to the Phenomenology of Spirit).¹⁸ In James’ view, Royce was speculative idealism’s most “formidable protagonist,” and though James himself once remarked on the “sterility” of idealist philosophical thinking, he thought Royce’s arguments for the claims of speculative idealism to be so challenging and compelling that he was unable to find answers he considered adequate to these arguments until the early 1890’s, nearly ten years after he brought Royce to Harvard.¹⁹ Hence, when DuBois arrived in Cambridge in 1888 to study philosophy, he entered into an intellectual community in which even an ardent critic of idealism, like James himself, could remain prey to a defensive preoccupation with the authority of what was then a prestigious and influential idealist philosophical tradition.²⁰ Given DuBois’ extensive exposure to James, it is not likely that he would have remained untouched by this preoccupation. For this reason, it seems not improbable that DuBois’ autobiographical remarks, so far as they contrast the “sterile land of philosophical speculation” to “realist pragmatism” and “the social sciences,” pertain in part to a local debate at Harvard between the advocates of speculative idealism (e.g., George Herbert Palmer and Royce) and their realist and empiricist detractors (e.g., Albert Bushnell Hart and James) (emphasis mine). We may reasonably conjecture, then, that DuBois had idealism in mind when (echoing James) he wrote of sterility and scholasticism in philosophy, rather than, as West suggests, some general conception of Cartesian epistemology.²¹ Since, furthermore, there appears to be no basis for the claim that DuBois saw speculative idealism as a Cartesian epistemological enterprise, and some reason to suppose that he would not have seen it that way (since, as Rorty reminds us, Hegel can be readily interpreted as having anticipated the “public” and “no-foundations” view of knowledge which Sellars, Rorty, and West advocate), we cannot assume that what DuBois’ remarks intimate was an evasion of Hegel was likewise an evasion of Descartes.²²

Still, we should not take these remarks at face value. Rather we should, when we consider them in light of the Hegelian concepts and Roycean rhetoric that play such a central role in Souls, question the assumption that DuBois’ late in life reminiscences of his time at Harvard provide the key to a reading of his most famous book. I can restate this point in the form of a third objection to West’s reading of Souls by saying that this reading, because it presumes on the basis of autobiographical remarks that DuBois is best read as a pragmatist, tends to overlook those features of DuBois’ text that speak strongly against such a reading. Whatever James’ influence on DuBois might have been, the fact remains that the argument of Souls is couched in the language and spirit of an idealist philosophical tradition that James saw as the preeminent contemporary alternative to his own pragmatism. Souls cannot be read without distortion as the work of a Jamesian and thus anti-idealist intellectual, which may be the reason that West, when reading Souls as an Emersonian text, keeps silent regarding its relation to James’ “nourishing” influence on DuBois. Despite this silence, West’s “Emersonian” interpretation of Souls is prejudiced by his view of DuBois as a Jamesian intellectual, if only because the primary purpose of West’s interpretation is to justify precisely this view. It is not surprising, therefore, that the “individualist” Emerson West finds in DuBois is the same Emerson he finds in James (West, AE, pp. 54–68).

I want to conclude my discussion of the textual evidence West presents for his interpretation of DuBois by considering briefly his reading of Black Reconstruction. Here, the gist of West’s argument is the claim that in this book DuBois “provides an account of the means by which industrial America imposed severe constraints upon an emerging or at least potential creative democracy” (emphasis mine) (West, AE, p. 146). Summarizing what he takes to have been DuBois’ view of Reconstruction, West writes that the “economic power of northern capitalists and southern planters, the racist attitudes of white workers and politicians and the struggles of black freed persons conjoined in a complex way to give initial hope for but ultimately defeat creative democracy in America” (emphasis mine) (West, AE, p. 146). Now for West, the concept of creative democracy pertains specifically to Dewey’s vision of a form of social life that “includes liberal, Jeffersonian, and socialist dimensions yet is ultimately guided by Emersonian cultural sensibilities” (emphasis mine) (West, AE, p. 103). This concept, as West analyzes it, stresses “self-creation and communal participation” and draws its critical significance from Dewey’s assumption that “the crisis of American civilization is first and foremost a cultural crisis of distraught individuals, abject subjects, and ruptured communities alienated from their own powers, capacities, and potentialities” (emphasis mine) (West, AE, p. 103). Thus, when West represents DuBois as interpreting Reconstruction in light of the concept of creative democracy, he implies that DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction in the spirit of a Deweyan pragmatism that understands and values democracy primarily as a stimulus to cultural renewal. This implied claim is false, however, since DuBois' concept of democracy is not Dewey's concept of creative democracy.

For DuBois, the defeat of democracy which attends the demise of Reconstruction is not the defeat of an attempt to realize an Emersonian culture of creative communities and individuals, but the destruction of black and white laborers’ efforts to free themselves from the forces of capitalist exploitation. DuBois views democracy, not as the solution to a cultural crisis, but as the legitimate transfer of political and economic power from the ruling classes to the working masses. Thus, the language he uses to describe the “problem of democracy” is not that of “distraught individuals” and “alienated communities” but of “exploitation,” “surplus value,” “property,” and “privilege.”²³ By (mis)re-presenting DuBoisian “democracy” as Deweyean “creative democracy” West obscures the connotations of class struggle which attach to DuBois’ use of the word “democracy” and, in this way, creates the illusion that Black Reconstruction grows out of a tradition of Emersonian cultural criticism.²⁴

Neither in his recounting of DuBois’ intellectual background nor in his readings of Souls and Black Reconstruction does West make a convincing case for the claim that DuBois should be read as a pragmatist. Though my criticisms of West’s attempts to justify this claim have been varied, the motive behind each of these criticisms has been to foreground some of the verbal and conceptual details which West’s analyses of DuBois’ writings overlook. More exactly, I have wanted to pay attention to the particulars of context (e.g., the relationship between what DuBois says in one paragraph and what he says in another, as well as the connotations assumed by the word “democracy” in various parts of Black Reconstruction), of diction (e.g., DuBois’ use of the phrase “true self-consciousness,” no less than his more famous use of the figure of the Veil), and of DuBois’ recontextualization of the language and ideas he finds in various received texts (e.g., Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, his Phenomenology of Spirit, and Royce’s The Spirit of Modern Philosophy). By thus focusing on the verbal texture of the texts West discusses, I hope to have elucidated the many ways in which they resist his efforts to fix them as outgrowths of a developing organism called “American pragmatism.” If there is a general lesson to be learned here, it is, I think, that organic models of intellectual history prove persuasive, only if we ignore the verbal and conceptual details which complicate and contest our readings of written works, in order falsely to represent those works as readily definable phases in the unfolding of some single vital potency. In West’s case, one could continue to test this lesson, by submitting his readings of Emerson, James, Quine, and others to the same kind of scrutiny which I hope to have brought to his reading of DuBois.

West’s failure to show that DuBois should be read as a pragmatist has substantive as well as methodological implications. The substantive implications I have in mind pertain specifically to West’s two intentions to tell a story about American pragmatism and to create a persona proper to the conclusion of that story. West’s effort to fulfill the second of these intentions becomes most explicit in the last chapter of The American Evasion of Philosophy. Here, he characterizes himself as a prophetic pragmatist and explicitly connects prophetic pragmatism to the progressive politics of feminist, black, and third world social movements. Ties to these politics are essential to West’s conception of prophetic pragmatism, yet seem extraneous to the pragmatist tradition generally, which has been largely oblivious to feminist, black, and third world concerns. West, of course, wants to deny this extraneousness, and to insist that his own commitment to these concerns is continuous with the pragmatist tradition he inherits and cherishes.

Now as I read West, his only stated justification for this insistence is his interpretation of DuBois. DuBois, he argues, was the only pragmatist who did not avoid “the political struggles” of “ordinary people.” He seems too to have been the only pragmatist who advocated an “international perspective” highlighting “the plight of the wretched of the earth,” as well as the only pragmatist “who viewed racism as contributing greatly to the impediments for both individuality and democracy.” DuBois was, finally, the only pragmatist whom West credits with an allusion to “the capacities and potentialities of women” (West, AE, pp. 147–8, pp. 180–81). In general, then, we may say that in The American Evasion of Philosophy, the figure of DuBois bears the full weight of West’s effort to link the progressive feminist, racial and third world preoccupations of prophetic pragmatism to what otherwise appears to be the received history of the pragmatist tradition. Subtract DuBois from this history, remove him, in other words, from the literal midpoint he occupies in West’s narrative, and that narrative will have little if anything to say to progressive feminist, anti-white-supremacist and third world social movements. Subtracting DuBois from West’s history is justified, I have been arguing, because DuBois’ major writings resist West’s attempts to classify them as outgrowths of pragmatism.

In order to fulfill his intention to represent his voice and thus the distinctive voice of prophetic pragmatism as emerging from the history of American pragmatism, West represents his voice as the repetition of pragmatist voices already heard. In particular, he represents his voice as a repetition of DuBois’ voice, and thus attempts to relate prophetic pragmatism and the entire pragmatist tradition to feminist, anti-white-supremacist and third world concerns. Since, however, DuBois’ voice cannot be unequivocally or even plausibly interpreted as that of a pragmatist, and so should be eliminated from West’s narrative, West’s representation of his voice as a repetition of DuBois’ voice, contrary to his intention, is best read as marking a huge rift between his history of American pragmatism and the politics essential to prophetic pragmatism. This representation should likewise be read as marking a rift in West’s public persona, the creation of which is the goal of his second intention, since this persona draws its appearance of integrity from the illusion that West’s “DuBoisian voice,” with all its feminist, anti-white supremacist, and third world preoccupations, like his “American Emersonian” voice, with all its passionate celebration of power, provocation, and personality, grow out of one and the same developing organism called “The American Evasion of Philosophy.”

In a recent interview with Bell Hooks, West describes The American Evasion of Philosophy as “an interpretation of the emergence, sustenance, and decline of American civilization from the vantage point of an African-American.”²⁵ His suggestion here, that we should read his genealogy of pragmatism as an allegory of American civilization, lets us see clearly the deep significance of what I have been insisting is West’s questionable interpretation of DuBois. Read allegorically, this interpretation is West’s effort to incorporate the political struggles of blacks, women, and third world peoples into the story of America. Yet the rifts which appear in this story and in West’s own narrative voice persuasively suggest that the sort of narrative incorporation he is attempting here cannot easily be achieved. They suggest, in fine, that historically persistent political contestations over racial and/or gender meanings, as well as political commitments that have bound and continue to bind many Americans to often anti-imperialist and hence anti-American third world politics, cannot but produce fissures and discontinuities in any attempt to represent the history of “America” as a single and organically unified narrative whole.²⁶ They suggest, finally, that in addition to evading Cartesian epistemology, prophetic pragmatists might also learn to evade the narrative myth of “America.”²⁷

EVADING PROPHETIC PRAGMATISM

Read generously, my criticism of West thus far could be taken as providing a good pragmatist argument to shift my discussion of his book away from his historiographical intentions to his political and prophetic ambitions. What these criticisms could be taken to demonstrate, in other words, is that The American Evasion of Philosophy is precisely not the sort of book that should be read in the perspective of the will to truth, which is the perspective in which I have been reading it and in which it seems in some significant respects not to succeed, but a book that should be read in the perspective of West’s own pragmatist imperative to construct, inspire, and provoke a constituency. From such a perspective, it seems, one can take for granted that the will to truth, when deconstructively applied to texts such as West’s, will inevitably reveal questionable models of narrative continuity, biased misreadings of particular writings, and multiple voices where there was supposed to be only one voice. Thus, the argument continues, the only important question from a Westian pragmatist point of view is whether, rift ridden or not, West indeed does produce a prophetic-pragmatist voice and persona that should be expected to succeed in constructing, inspiring, and provoking the constituencies he wants to construct, inspire, and provoke.²⁸

The answer to this question is, I believe, no. My reason for offering this answer is not that West has failed to write a book that will provoke his readers interest. West’s book is interesting, because his heroic yet very personal effort to combine in a single narrative his Christian, socialist, black freedom fighting and pragmatist allegiances is almost always pungent and never boring. Yet, in provoking his audience, West wishes to be more than interesting; he wishes, in other words, for his book to be something more than a transient academic fad and conversation piece (West, AE, p. 232). In West’s view, the ultimate purpose of his book is to elaborate a prophetic-pragmatist voice and persona that will be a “material force” possessing a “potency and effect” capable of making “a difference in the world” (West, AE, p. 232). This ambition notwithstanding, West’s aspiration is likely to remain a velleity, for the simple reason that the voice and persona he constructs, because they speak to so many, cannot speak effectively to anyone.

My point here is closely related to the concerns Martha Minow expresses when, in her review of The American Evasion of Philosophy, she responds to West’s claim that “it is possible to be a prophetic pragmatist and belong to several political movements, e.g., feminist, Chicano, Black, socialist, left-liberal ones” (West, AE, p. 232). “Are any self-designated political movements incompatible with prophetic pragmatism,” Minow asks, “and if so, why?” To be sure, Minow admires the political ambitions of prophetic pragmatism, yet she also worries that because West “leaves basic questions of strategy and implementation so undefined his articulation of aims sometimes resembles mere campaign slogans.”²⁹ Minow’s two concerns seem to me to be related, since it is hard to see how West could produce anything but mere campaign slogans without being more specific about what messages he wants to communicate to which particular political movements. Were he to become more specific, however, it is not clear that he could speak effectively to some of the constituencies he wants to court without alienating others. As West well knows, the politics of race, class, and gender often contradict each other.

To be fair to West, I should note that he is aware of these problems and that he does offer a solution. His name for that solution is “the black church”:

To be part of the black freedom movement is to rub elbows with some prophetic black preachers and parishoners. And to be part of the forces of progress in America is to rub up against some of these black freedom fighters.

If prophetic pragmatism is ever to become more than a conversational subject matter for cultural critics in and out of the academy, it must inspire progressive and prophetic social motion. One precondition of this kind of social movement is the emergence of potent prophetic religious practices in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. And given the historical weight of such practices in the American past the probably catalyst for social motion will be the prophetic wing of the black church. Need we remind ourselves that the most significant and successful organic intellectual in twentieth-century America—maybe in American history—was a product of and leader in the prophetic wing of the black church?

(West, AE, p. 234)

The organic intellectual and leader whom West has in mind is Martin Luther King, Jr. This is significant, since in the very next paragraph West expands on his allusion to King in order further to vindicate his belief that the prophetic wing of the black church can transform prophetic pragmatism into a political force capable of inspiring a progressive and broadly based social movement. According to West, “the social movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., represents the best of what the political dimension of prophetic pragmatism is all about” (West, AE, p. 234). And while West admits that King himself “was not a prophetic pragmatist,” he still uses King’s example to buttress his view that prophetic pragmatism can reasonably be expected to become an effective political force through the agency of leadership emerging from the black church:

He (King) was a prophet, in which role he contributed mightily to the political project of prophetic pragmatism. His all-embracing moral vision facilitated alliances and coalitions across racial, gender, class, and religious lines. His Ghandian method of nonviolent resistance highlighted forms of love, courage, and discipline worthy of a compassionate prophet. And his appropriation and interpretation of American civil religion extended the tradition of American jeremiads, a tradition of public exhortation that joins social criticism of America to moral renewal and admonishes the country to be true to its founding ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. King accented the antiracist and anti-imperialist consequences of taking seriously these ideals, thereby linking the struggle for freedom in America to those movements in South Africa, Poland, South Korea, Ethiopia, Chile, and the Soviet Union.

(West, AE, p. 235)

It is perhaps obvious from this passage that West’s use of Martin King comes eventually to resemble his use of DuBois. Whereas West rhetorically deploys the figure of DuBois to persuade his readers that his prophetic-pragmatist commitments to feminist, black, and third world struggles for freedom have “roots” in the historical past of American pragmatism, he rhetorically deploys the figure of King to persuade them that the spirit of prophetic pragmatism can become a political force that stimulates and sustains these struggles in the future. He seems to suggest, in other words, that though King was no prophetic pragmatist, prophetic pragmatists coming out of the black church could contribute “mightily to the political project of prophetic pragmatism” by emulating King, that is, by articulating an “all-embracing moral vision” that, far from being reducible to empty sloganeering, proved effective as a means to the instigation of “social motion” geared to the organization of political alliances encompassing gender-based, race-based, and class-based agendas. Immediately after concluding his discussion of King, West reinforces this apparent suggestion by re-citing in the language of prophetic pragmatism much of the substance of King’s “all-embracing moral vision”: “Prophetic pragmatism worships at no ideological altars. It condemns oppression anywhere and everywhere … In this way, the precious ideals of individuality and democracy of prophetic pragmatism oppose all those power structures that lack public accountability … Nor is prophetic pragmatism confined to any preordained historical agent … Rather it invites all people of goodwill both here and abroad to fight for an Emersonian culture of creative democracy in which the plight of the wretched of the earth is alleviated.” (West, AE, p. 235)

West’s turn to the black church and to Martin King raises a number of questions. One might worry, for example, that West has not said nearly enough to support his belief that the likely catalyst for “progressive and prophetic social motion” will be “the prophetic wing of the black church.” His appeal to the “historical weight” of past prophetic religious practices is only the beginning of an argument and, in any case, appears to ignore the controversy still surrounding the idea that the history of the black church has been a history of progressive politics. That controversy is relevant to the position which West takes, since his turn to the black church will seem problematic to anyone who subscribes to the view that the history of the black church has not on the whole been one of emancipatory political activity.³⁰

A second question raised by West’s turn to King and the church concerns the extent to which the “alliances and coalitions” King helped to lead were indeed “facilitated” by his moral vision. Just how politically significant were King’s moral and civil religious exhortations? We typically think of coalition politics as being based on and primarily facilitated by the convergence of group interests.³¹ Is West claiming that “moral vision,” as distinct from the convergence of interests, played an exceptionally important role in sustaining the coalitions with which King involved himself during the civil rights movement? And if this is West’s claim, what are we to say about the fact that, when King’s political agenda changed in the mid-sixties, he found himself attempting to lead a very different coalition of groups than he led previously (though some of his allies deserted him, he seems also to have envisioned the possibility of enlisting new ones), even though, it seems, his moral commitments did not change?³²

The final question I want to address, and the one I wish most to emphasize, concerns West’s failure, despite his appeal to King’s example, persuasively to show that an all-embracing moral vision, even if set forth by a prophet stemming from the prophetic wing of the black church, might sensibly be expected to transform prophetic pragmatism from a conversation piece into an effective political force. By citing and re-citing King’s vision, West says nothing to justify his belief that under present circumstances the articulation of a broadly encompassing moral outlook might reasonably be anticipated to encourage the coalition building he believes is desirable. His discourse, moreover, precisely because of the generality and abstractness of its magnanimous all-embracing rhetoric (Prophetic pragmatism “invites all people of goodwill both here and abroad …”), effectively ignores what one social theorist recently described as the “polylogical” character of contemporary politics.³³ West, in other words, pays no heed to the existence of multiple and competing moral and political idioms, and so permits himself the highly dubious assumption that the moral idiom of prophetic pragmatism possesses a universal significance adequate to interpreting the needs, interests, and identities of gay, feminist, working class, Chicano, Black, and Asian collectivities, not to mention the various third-world and international constituencies to which he also alludes. Nearer to the truth, I think, is the suspicion I hinted at above that prophetic pragmatism’s abstract and, to that extent, all too easily embraced moral idiom will prove superfluous to the need-interpreting and identity-forming deliberations of the various “subaltern counterpublics” which West wishes to address.³⁴ Thus, despite the moral high ground he stakes out for himself, West’s pragmatism, like Rorty’s, is likely to remain a pragmatism without consequences.

Though idiomatic and discursive discontinuities seem to be constitutive of contemporary politics, we need not treat them as absolute.³⁵ It seems clear, moreover, that left politics in the United States have much to gain from efforts to bring different moral and political idioms into dialogue with each other.³⁶ Prophetic pragmatism will not help here, since its putatively universal moral discourse, rather than serving to bring different, antagonistic, and frequently misunderstood voices into politically productive discussions and alliances with each other, effectively “brackets” the substantive difference which need to be the starting points of such discussions and alliances. Thus, it would seem reasonable for leftists to evade prophetic pragmatism and, without presupposing the possibility of a unified political discourse of the left that could effect a comprehensive Aufhebung of all relevant discursive discontinuities, still recover something of DuBois’ impulse to see his way beyond the isolating effects of social contradictions to the possibility of conversational communications between co-workers.

Notes

1. See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of American Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 5. Future references to this work will appear in the text as West, AE.

2. For West’s reference to Dewey as “the greatest of the American pragmatists,” see West, p. 69. For persuasive criticisms of Rorty that, like West’s, emphasize the importance of social theory to politics, see Thomas McCarthy “Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to Rorty’s Reply,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): pp. 644–655 and Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity: Richard Rorty Between Romanticism and Technocracy” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 39–62. For, finally, a very insightful critique of Rorty’s genealogy of modern philosophy that quite convincingly questions the primacy which he and, following him, West accord the pursuit of certain and indubitable “grounds” of knowledge, see Margaret Wilson, “Skepticism Without Indubitability,” The Journal of Philosophy LXXXI, 10 (1984): pp. 537–544.

3. West explicitly represents his narrative as critically subsuming the legacy of evasion and as culminating in his own prophetic pragmatist. See West, pp. 7, 210.

4. See West, pp. 36, 69, 85, 6, 71, 60, 111, 114, 128, 136, 194, 182, 212, 138, 4 and passim.

5. West repeatedly stresses the ways in which the various pragmatists “revise” the tradition they inherit. There is a real tension, moreover, between this emphasis, which connotes conscious intentionality, and his rhetorical suggestion of the sort of unconscious organic processes which induce the growth of root-nourished plants.

6. See Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1982), pp. 48–50. In American Evasion West claims that prophetic pragmatism, despite its rejection of Foucault’s anti-romantic suspicion “of any talk about wholeness, totality, telos, purpose, or even future,” nonetheless “incorporates the genealogical mode of inquiry initiated by the later phase of Foucault’s work … (and) … promotes genealogical materialist modes of analysis similar in many respects to those of Foucault” (emphases mine). At this point, West, by means of a footnote, refers his readers to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which he describes as the “best example of Foucault’s powerful genealogical investigations” (see West, American Evasion, pp. 223, 270). The gist of my argument is that these invocations of Foucault, notwithstanding West’s hint at the possibility of an oxymoronic anti-anti-romantic version of Foucauldian genealogy, explicitly embrace and celebrate a mode of genealogy that is thoroughly and essentially at odds with the organicist genealogical rhetoric of West’s book.

7. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals in On the Genealogy of Morals Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), especially section 12 of the second essay. See too Michel Foucault, “Language, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), especially pp. 151–2.

8. See Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and West, American Evasion, p. 248.

9. See Poirier, p. 147.

10. Here, I am drawing a conclusion that follows, I believe, from Poirier’s criticisms of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. Also relevant in this context is Paul de Man’s critique of Coleridge and the New Criticism in his essay “Form and Intent in American New Criticism.” See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), especially, p. 28.

11. See W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 9.

12. See DuBois, pp. 8–9.

13. See Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 404–5. It is worth noting, perhaps, that Williamson also mentions that DuBois’ description of the Negro as a “seventh son,” like his use of the figure of the veil, involves a play on certain voodoo (hoodoo) beliefs. For the relevant passages from Hegel’s lectures, see G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 91–9 and, for the German original, G.W.F. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, Band VIII, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. George Lasson (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1917), pp. 203–224. For a striking and brilliantly ironic treatment of Hegel’s discussion of Africa that contrasts sharply with DuBois’ revision of Hegel, see James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984).

14. See DuBois, pp. 81–2. DuBois’ suggestion that races may have world-historical destinies echoes his remark in “The Conservation of Races” (1897) that “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history” (quoted from Negro Social and Political Thought, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 485). DuBois’ appreciation of the tension between his own emphasis on race and the typically American celebration of the individual is evident in his insistence that “We, who have been reared and trained under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laissez-faire philosophy of Adam Smith” are loath to see and to acknowledge the role of race in human history (see Brotz, ed. p. 485). I should note, finally, that the specifically racialist twist which DuBois gives to Hegel’s conception of historical development probably reflects the influence of Alexander Crummell on his thinking. For a brief but useful discussion of Crummell’s connection to DuBois, see Wilson Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism 1850–1825 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978), pp. 132ff.

15. DuBois, p. 9.

16. Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1892), pp. 207cff.

17. Royce, pp. 207–8. I discuss in greater detail the Hegelian and Roycean motifs in Souls in my “Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The Souls of Black Folk” Social Science Information 26, 1 (1987): pp. 99–114. For another discussion of Royce’s relation to DuBois, see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 179–191.

18. My picture of Royce as a post-Kantian idealist who had an “Hegelian period” in the 1890’s derives directly from John Clendenning’s discussion of Royce’s relation to Hegelianism in his The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 229–30

19. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James Briefer Version (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 161, 163.

20. Perry, pp. 165–6.

21. I do not mean to suggest here that DuBois had only Hegel in mind. As Edward Hudlin reminds us, in his recent work on DuBois’ senior thesis, the young DuBois associated “scholasticism” with medieval philosophical tendencies that, he argued, remained present in the writings of Royce and James (see Hudlin, unpublished manuscript), p. 28.

22. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 192.

23. See W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 13, 15–16, 184, 206 and passim.

24. West himself notes that Marx and Emerson promote different versions of democracy (see American Evasion, p. 10). I have been arguing, moreover, that DuBois’ conception of democracy brings him much closer to Marx’s version than to the Emerson/Dewey conception of democracy which West celebrates.

25. See Emerge, October 1990.

26. My conception of racial politics as a contestation over racial meanings is based on Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s conception of race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle,” Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge: New York, 1986), p. 68. For a related conception of gender politics as a contestation of established “cultural configurations of gender” that “establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated,” see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge: New York, 1990), pp. 142–9.

27. Nathan Huggins has argued recently for the creation of a new American narrative myth that would “bring slavery and the persistent oppression of race from the margins to the center.” That this “centering” of race would be compatible with the articulation of an unambiguously unified narrative Huggins puts into doubt when he claims that his “new narrative would oblige us to face the deforming mirror of truth” (emphasis mine). See Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey (New York: Vintage, 1990), xi-lvii. Let me add, finally, in case there is any doubt, that I do not mean to be suggesting that one could more easily write a history of “black America,” applying an organic model, than one could of “America.” Thus, I am very much in sympathy with Werner Sollors’ recent critique of the assumption that, though no “single, unified story about America” is tenable, such stories are somehow viable in the cases of literary and cultural studies of groups identified by gender, ethnicity, or race. See Werner Sollors, “Of Mules and Mares in a Land of Difference; or, Quadrapeds All?,” American Quarterly 42, 2 (June 1990): especially pp. 178ff. For a related critique (from a very different critical perspective) of the use of organic models of literary history which locate the “roots” of racially or ethnically identified literary traditions in “original ‘folk’ consciousness,” see Hazel Carby’s discussion of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, literary critical project (most fully developed in The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)) in her essay “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction, Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 1989): pp. 41–3.

28. For West’s articulation of his inspirational ambition, see the “Introduction” to American Evasion.

29. Martha Minow, Reconstruction 1, 2 1990, p. 61.

30. For a view of the black church as a characteristically accommodationist and conservative institution, see Adolph Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), especially chapter 4. (It is perhaps worth noting here that Reed, in this chapter, explicitly criticizes the claims which West makes regarding the emancipatory potentiality of black Christianity in the latter’s first book, Prophesy Deliverance.) For a helpfully subtle and nuanced discussion of the history of Afro-American religion and politics that raises issues of direct pertinence to West’s views while also questioning the “myth of modernization” which shapes Reed’s outlook, see David W. Wills, “Beyond Commonality and Plurality: Persistent Racial Polarity in American Religion and Politics,” in Religion and American Politics From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 199–224.

31. For a brief but useful discussion of coalition politics and their limitations, see Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy Toward a Transformation of American Society (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 173ff.

32. I am indebted here to David Levering Lewis’ discussion of the second (1966 and after) phase of King’s “civil rights career” in his “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Promise of Nonviolent Populism” in Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 292ff.

33. Cf. Fraser, “Solidarity and Singularity,” pp. 51–9.

34. Nancy Fraser has introduced the notion of a “subaltern counterpublic” to characterize “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” Her primary example of such an arena is the “U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic, with its variegated array of journals, book stores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals and local meeting places.” See Nancy Fraser “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25–26 (1990): p. 67.

35. Cf. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 19855), pp. 182–4, 188.

36. Cf. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 54, fn. 31 and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Conservation of ‘Race,’” Black American Literature Forum, 23, 1 (Spring 1989): pp. 55ff.