| Now, more than forty years after his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. is the subject of new scholarly attention. Emphasizing his social and economic philosophy especially, the new King Studies is nonetheless interdisciplinary and seeks to understand King as significantly more than a popular icon and civil rights spokesperson. In this seminar, we will take up the project of the new King Studies, recasting King as public intellectual, radical democrat, moral philosopher, charismatic orator, practical theologian, and political theorist. Moreover, we will seek to identify the several ways in which King, the local preacher and international statesman, was constructed—made, after a fashion—by the community of anonymous, largely southern black actors whose collective vision for the beloved community King effectively distilled but did not, by his own genius uniquely, conceive. We will read and discuss recent works in fiction, rhetoric, visual culture, black intellectual history, and religious studies, and will consider a graphic biography of King in order to view King and his activities in ways subtler and more critically informed than, lamentably, his image’s oversimplified, popular appropriation too often allows. Readings include works by Ho Che Anderson, Eric Sundquist, Richard Litscher, Michael Eric Dyson, June Jordan, Charles Marsh, Julianne Malveaux and Michael Honey. |
