The upsurge of Southern writing in the thirties and forties, and the literary reassessment of the region's traditions is reflected

A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955

Literature & Fiction

King, Richard H.

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This perceptive study of a major cultural movement shows how Southern writers of 1930 t0 1955 tried to come to terms with Southern tradition, and discusses the resulting body of significant literature - fiction, poetry, memoirs, and historical writing.

Focusing attention on the political ideas that were influential as well as those that were central to the civil rights movement, this pathbreaking book examines not only written texts but also oral history interviews to establish a rich tradition of freedom that emerged from the movement. He also makes clear that, though liberal notions of freedom involving the absence of restrictions and equal protections were crucial to movement goals, the movement was as much about individual and collective self-transformation and political participation as it was about removal of barriers to social and political equality. Along the way figures such as Martin Luther King and Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael and James Forman, and political thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon are discussed and analyzed. Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom concludes that the civil rights movement helped revitalize the meaning of citizenship and the political importance of self-respect in the contemporary world with implications reaching beyond its original setting.

Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom

History

Americas

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since. As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.

Arendt and America

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University of Chicago Press

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule.   Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since.  As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.

Historical

Toward the end of World War II, scholars and writers reeling from the politics of racism stressed the unity of humankind, but by the early 1970s, dominant voices proclaimed ongoing diversity―sometimes irreconcilable antagonism―among human cultures. To study this transition from universalism to cultural particularism, Richard King focuses on the arguments of major thinkers, movements, and traditions of thought, attempting to construct a map of the ideological positions that were staked out and an intellectual history of this transition.
King's range is international, from North American and European concerns, to the Negritude movement of Africa and the Caribbean, to arguments raised at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. And his comparisons embrace a diversity of subjects, such as anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, and political, psychological, and sociological models of oppression, accommodation, and resistance. This study explores the intellectual roots of current debates over such topics as affirmative action, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and humanism. Among thinkers who receive sustained attention are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Bruno Bettelheim, Harold Cruse, Stanley Elkins, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, E. Franklin Frazier, Raul Hilberg, Max Horkheimer, C. L. R. James, Albert Memmi, Albert Murray, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Richard Wright.

Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970

Africa

Johns Hopkins University Press

Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom is a groundbreaking work, one of the first to show in detail how the civil rights movement crystallized our views of citizenship as a grassroots-level, collective endeavor and of self-respect as a formidable political tool. Drawing on both oral and written sources, Richard H. King shows how rank-and-file movement participants defined and discussed such concepts as rights, equality, justice, and, in particular, freedom, and how such key movement leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, and James Forman were attuned to this "freedom talk." The book includes chapters on the concept of freedom in its many varieties, both individual and collective; on self-interest and self-respect; on Martin Luther King's use of the idea of freedom; and on the intellectual evolution of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, especially in light of Frantz Fanon's thought among movement radicals. In demonstrating that self-respect, self-determination, and solidarity were as central to the goals of the movement as the dismantling of the Jim Crow system, King argues that the movement's success should not be measured in terms of tangible, quantifiable advances alone, such as voter registration increases or improved standards of living. Not only has the civil rights movement helped strengthen the meaning and political importance of active citizenship in the contemporary world, says King, but

University of Georgia Press

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Books by King, Richard H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by King, Richard H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955

A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955

Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom

Arendt and America

Arendt and America

Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970

Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom