Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising keeps the public debate alive by exploring the connections between the Rodney King incidents and the ordinary workings of cultural, political, and economic power in contemporary America. Its recurrent theme is the continuing, complicated significance of race in American society. Contributors: Houston A. Baker, Jr.; Judith Butler; Sumi K. Cho; Kimberle Crenshaw; Mike Davis; Thomas L. Dumm; Walter C. Farrell, Jr.; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Robert Gooding-Williams; James H. Johnson, Jr.; Elaine H. Kim; Melvin L. Oliver;...

The Rodney King incidents - the beating, the trial and the uprising - raised a number of questions about the connections between poverty, racial ideology, economic competition, and the exercise of political power. What is the relationship between the beating of Rodney King and the workings of racism in America? How was it possible for defence attorneys to convince a jury that the videotape they saw did not depict an excessive or unjustified use of violence? In the burning of Koreatown, what role did racial stereotypes of African Americans and Korean Americans play, and how, are we to...

Providing an insight into the interplay of race, culture and democracy, this text explores the cultural and political significance of racial identity and racial ideology in post-segregation America.

In "Look, a Negro!," political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around issues of race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child with the words "Look, a Negro!," his book is an insightful, rich and unusually wide ranging work of social criticism.
These essays engage the themes that have centrally occupied recent discussion of race and racial identity, among them, the workings of racial ideology (including the interplay of gender and sexuality in the...

Critical Affinities is the first book to explore the multifaceted relationship between the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and various dimensions of African American thought. Exploring the connections between these two unlikely interlocutors, the contributors focus on unmasking and understanding the root causes and racially inflected symptoms of various manifestations of cultural malaise. They contemplate the operative warrant for reconstituted conceptions of racial identity and recognize the existential and social recuperative potential of the will to power. In so doing, they...

In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism--that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values--the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that...

In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism--that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values--the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the -last man-) by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that...