Keeping faith : [electronic resource] philosophy and race in America / Cornel West.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [293]-308) and index.

Cultural criticism and race -- The new cultural politics of difference -- Black critics and the pitfalls of canon formation -- A note on race and architecture -- Horace Pippin's challenge to art criticism -- The dilemma of the black intellectual -- Philosophy and political engagement -- Theory, pragmatisms and politics -- Pragmatism and the sense of the tragic -- The historicist turn in philosophy of religion -- The limits of neopragmatism -- On George Lukács -- Fredric Jameson's American Marxism -- Law and culture -- Reassessing the critical legal studies movement -- Critical legal studies and a liberal critic -- Charles Taylor and the critical legal studies movement -- The role of law in progressive politics -- Explaining race -- Race and social theory -- The paradox of the African American rebellion.

In Keeping Faith, Cornel West - author of the bestselling Race Matters - puts forward his ideas about race and about philosophy. West's powerful voice ranges widely across issues of race and culture, the role of the black intellectual, politics and philosophy in America, art and architecture, questions of legal theory, and the future of liberal thought. In a time of decay and discouragement in the black community and among progressive forces at large, Keeping Faith offers new strategies to galvanize and propel a new generation of African Americans. Yet, West argues, racial subordination must be understood within the larger crises of our society. Maintaining the uniqueness of black identity and resistance, he provocatively suggests alliances with other intellectual and community-based forms of American radicalism.

Keeping Faith offers West's distinctive mix of political passions and careful scrutiny. Whether exploring 'the new cultural politics of difference', American pragmatism, or race and social theory, he sustains a difficult balance between a subtly argued critique of the past and present, and a broadly conceived, daring vision of the future. Both troubling and exhilarating, Keeping Faith maps not only the concerns of one of the most significant public intellectuals of our time, but issues crucial to Americans of all races.