Placing Paul Robeson in History: Understanding His Philosophical Framework (original) (raw)

Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson

2020

Cover designed by Drew Sisk Text designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services element | xv enforced quietude, motivating creation, narrative, and possibility. Neruda organizes recurrent scenes of Robeson as and in relation to earth, fire, water, and air, stimulating our reception of Robeson as organic and fundamental. He is portrayed as "the song of germinating earth, the river and the movement of nature," "the potent voice of the water over the fire," and the "voice of the earth" whose "river of a heart was deeper, was wider than the silence." Allusions to water-"you were a subterranean river"-reflect and extend his proximity and relationship to the Show Boat role that made him a star as well as to the laboring peoples on the Mississippi and Niger who taught him his history through the languages and cultures of African peoples. 8 Narrative and lyrical representations of Robeson frequently document sound as the authentic revelation of his beliefs, materiality, and transit across and beneath the oceans. Through music, his character and contributions are uniquely congealed, forming a spectacular and complex substance of body, meaning, and air: the Voice.

Expanding the African-American Studies Curriculum: "Paul Robeson: An American Life

Pennsylvania history, 1999

For almost twenty years since beginning teaching in 1968 at the University of California, I dealt regularly in class with the multifaceted accomplishments of Paul Robeson in many of my interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences courses. Because my focus has largely been on twentieth century cultural and political history, and because I have often emphasized the central problem of race and racism, my Robeson references have been both pedagogically appropriate and personally compelling. Paul Robeson is arguably the greatest Renaissance person in American history and one of the central cultural figures of the twentieth century. An exceptional scholar, lawyer, athlete, stage and screen actor, singer, and civil rights and political activist, he performed brilliantly in every professional enterprise he undertook. Few human beings have ever achieved his levels of excellence in even one field, much less several. Yet despite his extraordinary accomplishments, he remains virtually unknown by millions of educated Americans. In my own work as a university teacher, I rarely encountered students familiar with his many accomplishments. Indeed, most of my students, including African Americans, had not even heard of him. I often found it necessary to interrupt my regular course progression to inform students of Paul Robeson's life and work and to offer various explanations for the discouraging lack of public knowledge about the artist/ activist and his colossal impact. As a human being, I found this widespread ignorance disturbing and depressing. As an educator, I resolved to address the problem by initiating a new course that would simultaneously address this egregious educational deficiency and expand the curriculum in African American Studies. My goal was to offer UCLA students a systematic opportunity to learn about Paul Robeson and to provide, through a detailed examination of his life, a unique approach to study twentieth century history more generally. Because Robeson's spectacular talents in theater, film, music, and politics encourage students to understand culture in broader historical perspective, I also envisioned that the course would augment the interdisciplinary emphasis of African American Studies-a perspective that distinguishes the field from the conventional disciplines that have dominated university life for many decades. Believing that the time had come for a comprehensive examination of the man and his times for a university audience, I approached the UCLA Center for African American Studies. Quickly responding, the Center offered me the opportunity to present the upper division and graduate level course I entitled

The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright: Theorizing the African Diaspora

2008

The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright: Theorizing the African Diaspora" Confronted with the task of defining what it meant to be black in an anti-black world, early cultural critics faced intellectual, existential, and political challenges. This paper focuses on how Paul Robeson and Richard Wright met these challenges in the post-World War Two period. The author explores the way that Robeson and Wright's biographies and writings shed light on the ambiguities inherent in theorizing the African Diaspora.

Robespierre's Éloge De Gresset: Sources of Robespierre's Anti‐Philosophe Discourse

Intellectual History Review, 2010

“Mircea Platon throws new light on an early work by Robespierre, his Éloge de Gresset (1785), a conventional piece which nevertheless shows Robespierre's selective use of Enlightenment ideas of virtue and patrie in assessing the qualities of great men“ ( English Historical Review (2011) CXXVI (522): 1249-1306, p. 1250). doi: 10.1093/ehr/cer261

Review Essay : The many Robespierres from 1794 to the present

History of European Ideas, 2015

..... The authors demonstrate the complex web of nineteenth-century French political contexts that gave birth to the theory, or rather, theories, of ‘bourgeois revolution’ and in which the man-concept named Robespierre was appropriated by various political positions, forming a relation of mutual feedback between historical view and contemporary action. For the republicans and the socialists of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their respective prospect of future ideal society necessitated a reinterpretation of Robespierre and the French Revolution. It was regarded as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ from the very beginning (e.g., by Barnave) and its early afterlife (e.g., by Guizot), but the precise meaning and the political implication of the term remained volatile. Recently the term has been engaged in another battle between the advocates of the consciousness of the historical actors and those of the unpredictability of historical outcome and its discordance with original intentions; for the moment, the stake of the term has been scaled down to the latter position in order to keep the word as an analytical term, its strong claims of being a ‘precursor’ to a socialist revolution now brushed aside. The book shows that the view on Robespierre has been changing in tandem with the future-oriented stake of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ or with the strategy to realise sociopolitical transitions. This renders the well-known twentieth-century ‘trench warfare’ between the school of Lefebvre and that of Cobban, and most of all between those of Soboul and of Furet more deeply comprehensible. It is clear from Belissa and Bosc's book that from 1794 up to the present day, there has been no one Robespierre, no one positive or one negative view of Robespierre, no one Robespierre the demonic dictator or one Robespierre the revolutionary hero. There have always been so many ‘Robespierres’ even within the positive and within the negative—as it may well be that they will live on, the book is a timely contribution to the long historiography of the French Revolution and its most (in)famous protagonist.

The specter of Fanon: the student movements and the rationality of revolt in South Africa

The largest student revolt since Soweto 1976, the student movements of 2015, were historic, challenging the lack of serious reform in the university systems and bringing to the fore the question of decolonization. Named 'the Fanonian moment,' it was the latest expression of the disillusion of rainbow politics. Marked by the Marikana massacre and the death of Nelson Mandela, Fanon's name is almost as popular as Steve Biko's and his name is often referenced in newspaper articles. While Fanon's critique of post-apartheid has been well rehearsed in South Africa, this paper considers 'the Fanonian Moment' and the current popularity of Fanon as well as Steve Biko's idea of Black consciousness as critical elements of decolonial liberation. With a focus on the student movements, the paper suggests that Fanon's thought, and his notion of the rationality of revolt, is especially alive in intentional spaces where decolonization and liberation are linked with everyday questions of movement democracy and organization.