Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970.

Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970. By Richard H. King. (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 398. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8018-8066-1; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8018-8065-3.)

In this fine book, Richard H. King surveys how major figures in the postwar intellectual world argued about race and racism. King treats figures of the first rank, including Gunnar Myrdal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. King provides a valuable account of the interactions among American, European, and anticolonial Third World thinkers in an attempt to explain how racial thinking shifted in the three decades that he examined.

The received historical view of postwar racial thinking runs something like this: In the wake of World War II, so-called universalist thinking predominated and taught that racial differences were minor or nonexistent and that, once the ugly specters of racism and nationalism were interred in their graves, rapid cultural assimilation would ensue. According to the standard account, this universalist ethos predominated for the two decades following the war only to collapse in the mid-1960s in the face of anticolonial movements across the globe and renewed black nationalism in the United States, both of which based racial liberation on drawing cultural distinctions and the celebration of differences. A great strength of King's account is to complicate this standard historical narrative. While accepting the general outlines of the move from universalist to particularist visions, King clearly lays out that all particularisms were not the same and not all universalisms were the same.

One way that King distinguishes different thinkers from each tradition is by tracing how they dealt with the central problem of how to portray the crushing reality of racial oppression while simultaneously giving agency to those who suffered under the oppression. If one chooses to portray how racial oppression inflicts deep harms on the victims--as Bruno Bettelheim did in his portrayal of life in a Nazi concentration camps, as Hannah Arendt did in her depictions of life in a totalitarian society, and as Gunnar Myrdal did in his study of American segregation--then one risks the charge, which was leveled against these scholars, of blaming the victim. The background assumption of all three of these writers was universalist, but their rejection of racial essentialism was not immune from charges that they were themselves racist or, at a minimum, issuing apologia for racist regimes.

One of the strongest chapters of the book is on Stanley Elkins, whose controversial treatment of slavery as the psychological equivalent of a Nazi concentration camp was subsequently criticized for slighting the agency slaves brought to their own enslavement. King traces the ensuing arguments surrounding Elkins's treatment of the "Sambo" personality type--that it represented a "real" sign of psychological damage, a possible strategy of resistance, or a complete historical myth.

King's treatment of Elkins also underscores a limitation in King's approach. He explains in the introduction that his is a rather old-fashioned approach to intellectual history, focusing on the writers' ideas rather than their social context. This is a great strength of the book as King's careful and fair readings of his subjects' work are of great value. However, at times King's focus on ideas qua ideas can obscure how the writers were reacting to racial essentialism. King seems to write as if the older racist and essentialist ideas of the early twentieth century no longer existed after World War H, and, indeed, for many intellectuals such ideas had fallen from respectability. Such racist stereotypes were alive and well in the general population of the United States, however, and it seems to me that many of the writers King studies were not merely writing for each other but also for a wider audience. Stanley Elkins offered a reinterpretation of the slave experience that needed to be read against the work of U. B. Phillips, whose racist portrayal of Sambo was still widely accepted in the American South.

Rather than criticize the book for what it is not, however, it is better to praise it for what it is: a deeply researched and valuable account of some of the most troubling questions of the second half of the twentieth century. No other book on the market combines King's breadth of coverage with his skillful depth of reading of intellectuals in the postwar world.

JOHN P. JACKSON JR.

University of Colorado--Boulder