The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War

by Eugene D. Genovese

Eugene D. Genovese offers a series of engaging and highly provocative reflections on history - particularly southern history - and politics in the cultural war.
Genovese criticizes the Left and the Right with equal vigor. Calling political correctness "a new version of totalitarianism," he scorns the betrayal of Black Studies programs across the country, saying that "unless the stagnation and ghettoization of Black Studies programs are arrested, we shall, however inadvertently, condemn our universities and professions to many years of shamefaced complicity in an increasingly ominous resurgence of white racism and black despair." Other essays explore the political culture of the Old South and the centrality of religion to both southern and Afro-American history. Of particular interest is an extended treatment of the religious thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the King plagiarism scandal.
In "The Question," a searing essay that has already provoked heated debate, Genovese argues that a commitment to presumed "larger goals" led the radical Left to ignore, and therefore become complicit in, the mass murders of communism. And he suggests that today a similar blindness is fostering the promotion of totalitarian measures on our campuses.
"We are today indeed engaged in a cultural war," writes Genovese. "To win that war will require a new and hitherto unimaginable coalition across political and racial lines."

Genres: History, American History, American

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the Left and Marxism, and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Reviews

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good collection of essays from Eugene Genovese drawn from the mid 80s to mid 90s and covering a wide range of topics.

It's not a volume I would recommend to someone who hasn't read at least a few of Genovese's other works, only because many of these essays are book reviews, or speeches for specific occasions, so they lose part of their appeal to the general reader by their narrow context. But they are still good nonetheless.

[Troy Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is rare that a book has this kind of impact on one's thought. Wow.

[Alex]

Read chapter on King Jr's theology and Genovese's review of Cornel West.