An American Studies Meant for Interruption

• Published in: American quarterly Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 215 - 219
• Main Author: Ferguson, Roderick A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: College Park Johns Hopkins University Press 01.06.2010
• Subjects: African American culture; African American studies; African Americans; American studies; ASA Presidential Address and Responses; Bourgeois; Conservatism; Democracy; Ideology; Nationalism; Obama, Barack; Peacetime; Political discourse; Race; Swahili language; Teachers; United States history; Weber, Max (1864-1920)
• ISSN: 0003-0678; 1080-6490; 1080-6490
• DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0141

Alongside them, Gaines places President Barack Obama, whose victory, according to Gaines, was a triumph of the black freedom movement, particularly the vision of community organizing employed by Robert Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis, and inspired by their fundi (Swahili for 'teacher'), Ella Baker. Against the post-Reconstruction assault on black citizenship and humanity, black ministers, intellectuals, journalists, and reformers sought to refute the views that African Americans were biologically inferior and unassimilable by incorporating 'the race' into ostensibly universal but deeply racialized ideological categories of Western progress and civilization.5 This historic contradiction shaped African American intellectual formations so powerfully that, by the 1960s, it would produce no fewer than two civil rights movements embodied in two very different Martin Luther Kings.