WEST, CORNEL

born June 2, 1953, Tulsa, Okla., U.S. West, 1993 American intellectual, progressive postmodern philosopher whose revolutionary text Race Matters (1993) closely examined the American black community around the time of the Los Angeles race riots in April 1992. This collection of essays, which found a mainstream audience, considered such contemporary issues as the nihilism of the black underclass, black-Jewish relations, and the crisis of black leadership. After graduating from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1973 with a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern languages and literature, West pursued postgraduate study at Princeton University (M.A., 1975; Ph.D., 1980). Afterward he lectured and taught philosophy and religion at numerous schools, including Harvard, Yale University, Barnard College, Williams College, Haverford College, and the University of Paris. He also served as director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton University in the late 1980s. His first scholarly book, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), fused what might have been viewed as the contradictory doctrines of Marxism and Christianity into a cohesive whole through the examination of black writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison. In Prophesy Deliverance!, which received favourable reviews, West's aim was to begin to provide a critical framework for African-American scholarship. By the time Race Matters was published, West had established himself in the academic community with such texts as Prophetic Fragments (1988), The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991).