Christa Buschendorf Libri

"Celebrated intellectual and activist Cornel West offers an unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida Wells-Barnett. West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines. West finds that Douglass and, to some extent, Du Bois fall short of the high standards he holds them to, while King has been sanitized and even 'Santaclausified, ' rendering him less radical. By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire so essential in the age of Obama"-- Provided by publisher

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the core of human conflicts. They shape subsequent physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. The contributions to this volume highlight the role of power relations in the black experience. By applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias--habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, established-outsider relationships--to African American literature and culture, the authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as they are represented in the works of canonical and contemporary black writers, rap music, and figurations of political activism.

„Transatlantic Negotiations“ was the theme of the 52. annual convention of the German Association for American Studies, held in Frankfurt in 2005. Each contribution to this volume illuminates explicitly or implicitly the intricacies of negotiations embedded in different relationships of power as they reverberate through history. Together they present a wide range of forms of interaction between Europe, Africa, and America, from fruitful exchange to contemptuous or thoughtless discrimination. The collection thus points to a salient feature of transatlantic relations, namely the simultaneity of mutual enriching forms of negotiation, marked by reciprocity, with drastic forms of inequality in which the negotiating power is almost entirely one-sided.

Wie die Bezeichnungen „New Buddha“, „Prince of Atheists“ oder „Highpriest of Pessimism“ erkennen lassen, stellte Schopenhauer die christliche Weltsicht und den optimistischen Daseinsentwurf der Amerikaner auf eine harte Probe. In Interpretationen fiktionaler Texte, kulturkritischer Essays und philosophischer Schriften legt die sowohl literatur- und ideengeschichtlich als auch kulturhistorisch orientierte Studie dar, wie amerikanische Denker und Schriftsteller in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts in Debatten über die indische Weisheitslehre, die post-darwinistische Glaubenskrise, die Optimismus-Pessimismus-Kontroverse oder die eskapistische Buddhismus-Mode der Jahrhundertwende auf einen Philosophen reagierten, der die Realität menschlichen Leidens schonungslos exponiert und zugleich mit seiner Mitleidsethik hohe moralische Standards setzt. In der Konfrontation mit dem Hauptvertreter des Pessimismus rangen die Amerikaner mit der von ihnen zwar immer wieder verdrängten, in Krisenzeiten aber um so dringlicher empfundenen Frage nach der existentiellen Bedeutung von Schmerz, Leid und Tod.