Interviews by Melvin Rogers
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/podcasts/20141117.mp3
Books by Melvin Rogers
The Darkened Light of Faith, 2023
The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, 2023
Preorder Available: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691219134/the-darkened-light-... more Preorder Available: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691219134/the-darkened-light-of-faith
Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.
The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.
An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.
University of Chicago Press
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo58172054.htm... more University of Chicago Press
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo58172054.html
African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour.
While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
Table of Contents:
Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction
Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
1 Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race
Vincent Carretta
2 David Walker: Citizenship, Judgment, Freedom, and Solidarity
Melvin L. Rogers
3 Martin Delany’s Two Principles, the Argument for Emigration, and Revolutionary Black Nationalism
Robert Gooding-Williams
4 Harriet Jacobs: Prisoner of Hope
Nick Bromell
5 Frederick Douglass: Nonsovereign Freedom and the Plurality of Political Resistance
Sharon R. Krause
6 Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism
Frank M. Kirkland
7 Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception
Desmond Jagmohan
8 Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence
Carol Wayne White
9 Ida B. Wells on Racial Criminalization
Naomi Murakawa
10 W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality
Paul C. Taylor
11 Marcus Garvey: The Black Prince?
Michael Dawson
12 A. Philip Randolph: Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race
Michael McCann
13 Zora Neale Hurston’s Radical Individualism
Farah Jasmine Griffin
14 George S. Schuyler: Post-Souls Satirist
Jeffrey B. Ferguson
15 C. L. R. James: Race, Revolution, and Black Liberation
Anthony Bogues
16 Langston Hughes’s Ambivalent Political Expressivism
Jason Frank
17 Thurgood Marshall: The Legacy and Limits of Equality under the Law
Daniel Moak
18 Richard Wright: Realizing the Promise of the West
Tommie Shelby
19 Bayard Rustin: Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought
George Shulman
20 Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist
Danielle Allen
21 James Baldwin: Democracy between Nihilism and Hope
John E. Drabinski
22 Malcolm X: Dispatches on Racial Cruelty
Nikhil Pal Singh
23 Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force
David L. Chappell
24 Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy
Lawrie Balfour
25 Audre Lorde’s Politics of Difference
Jack Turner
26 Stokely Carmichael and the Longing for Black Liberation: Black Power and Beyond
Brandon M. Terry
27 Huey P. Newton and the Last Days of the Black Colony
Cedric G. Johnson
28 Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom
Neil Roberts
29 Clarence Thomas: Race Pessimism and Black Capitalism
Corey Robin
30 Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Tradition
Mark D. Wood
Acknowledgments
Index
Contributors
New Edition of The Public and Its Problems, Ohio University Press. This will replace the current ... more New Edition of The Public and Its Problems, Ohio University Press. This will replace the current Swallow Press version.
More than six decades after John Dewey’s death, his political philosophy is undergoing a revival. With renewed interest in pragmatism and its implications for democracy in an age of mass communication, bureaucracy, and ever-increasing social complexities, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, first published in 1927, remains vital to any discussion of today’s political issues.
This edition of The Public and Its Problems, meticulously annotated and interpreted with fresh insight by Melvin L. Rogers, radically updates the previous version published by Swallow Press. Rogers’s introduction locates Dewey’s work within its philosophical and historical context and explains its key ideas for a contemporary readership. Biographical information and a detailed bibliography round out this definitive edition, which will be essential to students and scholars both.
The Undiscovered Dewey explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas o... more The Undiscovered Dewey explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on John Dewey's philosophy of action, particularly its argument that inquiry proceeds from the uncertainty of human activity. Dewey separated the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story concerning the certainty of human progress. He then connected this thread to the way in which our reflective capacities aid us in improving our lives. Dewey therefore launched a new understanding of the modern self that encouraged intervention in social and natural environments but which nonetheless demanded courage and humility because of the intimate relationship between action and uncertainty.
Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives.
Papers by Melvin Rogers
the American, 2024
Excerpt from The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Politi... more Excerpt from The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Lapham's Quarterly: A Magazine of History and Ideas, 2023
An excerpt from Chapter 6 of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African... more An excerpt from Chapter 6 of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.
Unedited conclusion to my book, The Darkened Light of Faith.
... I would also like to thank Carol Puccino and Douglas Gunzler for a Herculean job of research ... more ... I would also like to thank Carol Puccino and Douglas Gunzler for a Herculean job of research and acquisi-tion. ... 1895 Booker T. Washington, in his Atlanta Exposition Address, lays out the philosophy that underlies his founding of Tuskegee Institute. ...
Political Theory, 2014
David Walker’s famous 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World expresses a puzzle at the ... more David Walker’s famous 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World expresses a puzzle at the very outset. What are we to make of the use of “Citizens” in the title given the denial of political rights to African Americans? This essay argues that the pamphlet relies on the cultural and linguistic norms associated with the term appeal in order to call into existence the political standing of black folks. Walker’s use of citizen does not need to rely on a recognitive legal relationship precisely because it is the practice of judging that illuminates one’s political, indeed, citizenly standing. Properly understood, the Appeal aspires to transform blacks and whites, and when it informs the prophetic dimension of the text, it tilts the entire pamphlet in a democratic direction. This is the political power of the pamphlet; it exemplifies the call-and-response logic of democratic self-governance.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2010
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2008
Page 1. Melvin L. Rogers ... PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 7 • pp. 799–824 Co... more Page 1. Melvin L. Rogers ... PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 7 • pp. 799–824 Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) and David Rasmussen www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708094728 Page 2. ...
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Interviews by Melvin Rogers
Live From the Vault: Rare Recordings of James Baldwin
In Conversation with Melvin Rogers and Nina Revoyr
Brian DeShazor, host of From the Vault, KPFK 90.7 FM
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Books by Melvin Rogers
Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.
The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.
An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo58172054.html
African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour.
While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
Table of Contents:
Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction
Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
1 Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race
Vincent Carretta
2 David Walker: Citizenship, Judgment, Freedom, and Solidarity
Melvin L. Rogers
3 Martin Delany’s Two Principles, the Argument for Emigration, and Revolutionary Black Nationalism
Robert Gooding-Williams
4 Harriet Jacobs: Prisoner of Hope
Nick Bromell
5 Frederick Douglass: Nonsovereign Freedom and the Plurality of Political Resistance
Sharon R. Krause
6 Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism
Frank M. Kirkland
7 Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception
Desmond Jagmohan
8 Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence
Carol Wayne White
9 Ida B. Wells on Racial Criminalization
Naomi Murakawa
10 W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality
Paul C. Taylor
11 Marcus Garvey: The Black Prince?
Michael Dawson
12 A. Philip Randolph: Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race
Michael McCann
13 Zora Neale Hurston’s Radical Individualism
Farah Jasmine Griffin
14 George S. Schuyler: Post-Souls Satirist
Jeffrey B. Ferguson
15 C. L. R. James: Race, Revolution, and Black Liberation
Anthony Bogues
16 Langston Hughes’s Ambivalent Political Expressivism
Jason Frank
17 Thurgood Marshall: The Legacy and Limits of Equality under the Law
Daniel Moak
18 Richard Wright: Realizing the Promise of the West
Tommie Shelby
19 Bayard Rustin: Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought
George Shulman
20 Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist
Danielle Allen
21 James Baldwin: Democracy between Nihilism and Hope
John E. Drabinski
22 Malcolm X: Dispatches on Racial Cruelty
Nikhil Pal Singh
23 Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force
David L. Chappell
24 Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy
Lawrie Balfour
25 Audre Lorde’s Politics of Difference
Jack Turner
26 Stokely Carmichael and the Longing for Black Liberation: Black Power and Beyond
Brandon M. Terry
27 Huey P. Newton and the Last Days of the Black Colony
Cedric G. Johnson
28 Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom
Neil Roberts
29 Clarence Thomas: Race Pessimism and Black Capitalism
Corey Robin
30 Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Tradition
Mark D. Wood
Acknowledgments
Index
Contributors
More than six decades after John Dewey’s death, his political philosophy is undergoing a revival. With renewed interest in pragmatism and its implications for democracy in an age of mass communication, bureaucracy, and ever-increasing social complexities, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, first published in 1927, remains vital to any discussion of today’s political issues.
This edition of The Public and Its Problems, meticulously annotated and interpreted with fresh insight by Melvin L. Rogers, radically updates the previous version published by Swallow Press. Rogers’s introduction locates Dewey’s work within its philosophical and historical context and explains its key ideas for a contemporary readership. Biographical information and a detailed bibliography round out this definitive edition, which will be essential to students and scholars both.
Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives.
Papers by Melvin Rogers
Live From the Vault: Rare Recordings of James Baldwin
In Conversation with Melvin Rogers and Nina Revoyr
Brian DeShazor, host of From the Vault, KPFK 90.7 FM
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.
The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.
An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo58172054.html
African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour.
While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
Table of Contents:
Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction
Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
1 Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race
Vincent Carretta
2 David Walker: Citizenship, Judgment, Freedom, and Solidarity
Melvin L. Rogers
3 Martin Delany’s Two Principles, the Argument for Emigration, and Revolutionary Black Nationalism
Robert Gooding-Williams
4 Harriet Jacobs: Prisoner of Hope
Nick Bromell
5 Frederick Douglass: Nonsovereign Freedom and the Plurality of Political Resistance
Sharon R. Krause
6 Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism
Frank M. Kirkland
7 Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception
Desmond Jagmohan
8 Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence
Carol Wayne White
9 Ida B. Wells on Racial Criminalization
Naomi Murakawa
10 W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality
Paul C. Taylor
11 Marcus Garvey: The Black Prince?
Michael Dawson
12 A. Philip Randolph: Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race
Michael McCann
13 Zora Neale Hurston’s Radical Individualism
Farah Jasmine Griffin
14 George S. Schuyler: Post-Souls Satirist
Jeffrey B. Ferguson
15 C. L. R. James: Race, Revolution, and Black Liberation
Anthony Bogues
16 Langston Hughes’s Ambivalent Political Expressivism
Jason Frank
17 Thurgood Marshall: The Legacy and Limits of Equality under the Law
Daniel Moak
18 Richard Wright: Realizing the Promise of the West
Tommie Shelby
19 Bayard Rustin: Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought
George Shulman
20 Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist
Danielle Allen
21 James Baldwin: Democracy between Nihilism and Hope
John E. Drabinski
22 Malcolm X: Dispatches on Racial Cruelty
Nikhil Pal Singh
23 Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force
David L. Chappell
24 Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy
Lawrie Balfour
25 Audre Lorde’s Politics of Difference
Jack Turner
26 Stokely Carmichael and the Longing for Black Liberation: Black Power and Beyond
Brandon M. Terry
27 Huey P. Newton and the Last Days of the Black Colony
Cedric G. Johnson
28 Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom
Neil Roberts
29 Clarence Thomas: Race Pessimism and Black Capitalism
Corey Robin
30 Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Tradition
Mark D. Wood
Acknowledgments
Index
Contributors
More than six decades after John Dewey’s death, his political philosophy is undergoing a revival. With renewed interest in pragmatism and its implications for democracy in an age of mass communication, bureaucracy, and ever-increasing social complexities, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, first published in 1927, remains vital to any discussion of today’s political issues.
This edition of The Public and Its Problems, meticulously annotated and interpreted with fresh insight by Melvin L. Rogers, radically updates the previous version published by Swallow Press. Rogers’s introduction locates Dewey’s work within its philosophical and historical context and explains its key ideas for a contemporary readership. Biographical information and a detailed bibliography round out this definitive edition, which will be essential to students and scholars both.
Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives.
https://www.bostonreview.net/us/melvin-rogers-what-good-history-african-americans,
May 17, 2016