Belknap Press
Price: $29.95
|
JONATHAN RIEDER presents The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Harvard Book Store is pleased to host Barnard College and Columbia University sociology professor JONATHAN RIEDER as he discusses the life and endeavors of one of America’s greatest moral and political leaders. “You don’t know me,” Martin Luther King, Jr. once declared to those who criticized his denunciation of the Vietnam War, who wanted to confine him to the ghetto of “black” issues. Now, forty years after being felled by an assassin’s bullet, it is still difficult to take the measure of the man: apostle of peace or angry prophet; sublime exponent of a beloved community or fiery Moses leading his people up from bondage; black preacher or translator of blackness to the white world? This book explores the extraordinary performances through which King played with all of these possibilities, and others too, blending and gliding in and out of idioms and identities. Taking us deep into King's backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of this revolutionary leader.
|
|
Jonathan Rieder’s scholarly research spans the areas of sociology of culture; race, pluralism and ethnicity in the United States; and politics and language. He is also author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism and the editor of The Fractious Nation: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life. Between 1995 and 2001, Professor Rieder was the founding Co-Editor of CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations, which won national acclaim for the fresh way it explored a broad array of racial, ethnic and religious conflicts in the United States and beyond. He has been a contributing editor of The New Republic and is a regular contributor to the New York Sunday Times Book Review.
|
