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"Brother West" Reloaded

My review of Cornel West's autobiography last week provoked a lot of discussion, well beyond anything I ever expected. (And more, it seems, than anything I have written in almost five years of doing Intellectual Affairs.) In today's column, I consider some of this -- and address, among other things, the question of whether I have a secret desire to send West a box of fried chicken.

Some of West's earlier and more substantive work will be considered in the article promised in my talk on "C.L.R. James and African-American Liberation" during the summer.

I need to get back to work on it and not be distracted by chatter -- let alone by the sort of "literary streetfighting" that involves a seedy guy bludgeoning his own head with a thesaurus (to make the voices stop) and then bleeding all over me.

Posted on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | Return

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