Martin Luther King, Jr., may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King's assassination, ...the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King's writings and political thought remains underappreciated.In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative—an effort not at radical reform but at "living up to" enduring ideals laid down by the nation's founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King's writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of "color blindness" that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome.Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King's understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King's exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
Includes the entire text of "I Have A Dream"
"I have a dream"-no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin ...Luther King, Jr., in 1963. King's speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the "I have a dream" speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice-debates as old as the nation itself-and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom.
This book is the first to set King's speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings. At a time when the meaning of the speech has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause, Sundquist clarifies the transformative power of King's "Second Emancipation Proclamation" and its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was more than the civil rights movement's most visible figure, he was its voice. This book describes what went into the creation of that voice. It explores how King used words ...to define a movement. From a place situated between two cultures of American society, King shaped the language that gave the movement its identity and meaning. Fredrik Sunnemark shows how materialistic, idealistic, and religious ways of explaining the world coexisted in King's speeches and writings. He points out the roles of God, Jesus, the church, and the Beloved Community in King's rhetoric. Sunnemark examines King's use of allusions, his strategy of employing different meanings of key ideas to speak to different members of his audience, and the way he put into play international ideas and events to achieve certain rhetorical goals. The book concludes with an analysis of King's development after 1965, examining the roots, content, and consequences of his so-called radicalization.
A vision of the Orient Wisenthal, J. L
A vision of the Orient,
c2006, 20060929, 2006, 2014, 2006-01-01
eBook
Best known as the story from the 1904 Puccini opera, the compelling modern myth of Madame Butterfly has been read, watched, and re-interpreted for over a century, from Pierre Loti's 1887 novelMadame ...Chrysanthèmeto A.R. Gurney's 1999 playFar East. This fascinating collaborative volume examines the Madame Butterfly narrative in a wide variety of cultural contexts - literary, musical, theatrical, cinematic, historical, and political - and in a variety of media - opera, drama, film, and prose narratives - and includes contributions from a wide range of academic disciplines, such as Asian Studies, English Literature, Theatre, Musicology, and Film Studies.
From its original colonial beginnings, the Butterfly story has been turned about and inverted in recent years to shed light back on the nature of the relationship between East and West, remaining popular in its original version as well as in retellings such as David Henry Hwang's playM. Butterflyand David Cronenberg's screen adaptation. The combined perspectives that result from this collaboration provide new and challenging insights into the powerful, resonant myth of a painful encounter between East and West.
This book provides an up-to-date critical analysis of the relationship between King and the wider civil rights movement. Delivering a fresh perspective on the relationship between 'the man and the ...movement', Kirk argues that it is the interactionbetween national and local movement concerns that is essential to understanding King's leadership and black activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk examines King's strengths and his limitations, and weighs the role that king played in then movement alongside the contributions of other civil rights organizations and leaders, and local civil rights activists. Suitable for undergraduate courses in 20th century US history.
Taking us deep into Martin Luther King, Jr.'s backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, ...Jonathan Rieder tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of America's greatest moral and political leaders.
Living the Dream tells the history behind the
establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over
King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed.
Creating the first ...national holiday to honor an African American
was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against
conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts
to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The
ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a
namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be
received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her
husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative
politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed,
nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and
thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to
elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes,
how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the
arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected,
and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators
continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.
April 4, 1968 Dyson, Michael Eric
2009, 2009-01-06, 20080101
eBook
On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m., while he was standing on a balcony at a Memphis hotel, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and fatally wounded. Only hours earlier King ended his final speech with the ...words, I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land." Acclaimed public intellectual and best-selling author Michael Eric Dyson examines how King fought, and faced, his own death, and how America can draw on his legacy in the twenty-first century. April 4, 1968 celebrates the leadership of Dr. King, and challenges America to renew its commitment to his vision.
