"…Thinking about my new position at Princeton, I said, "Afro-American studies was never meant to be solely for Afro-Americans. It was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American, because people of African descent in this country are profoundly human, profoundly modern, profoundly American."
When bell asked what the essence was of my recently published book, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, I answered that it was "an interpretation of the emergency, the sustenance, and the decline of American civilization from the vantage point of an African American. It means that we have to have a cosmopolitan orientation, even though it is rooted in the fundamental concern with the plight and predicaments of African Americans."
I went on to argue "that there are fundamental themes, like experimentation and improvisation, that can be found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, that are thoroughly continuous with the great art form that Afro-Americans have given the modern world, which is jazz. And therefore to talk about America is to talk about improvisation and experimentation, and therefore to talk about Emerson and Louis Armstrong in the same breath."
I told the story of the cultural and political significance of the major native philosophic tradition in America best represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, W. V. Quine, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Unger. My own prophetic pragmatism was the culminating point of the story…." — Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir by Cornel West
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