>
> ^^^^^
> CB: What is Genovese's thesis ?
But, Charles, you've called Genovese a racist here before, which would imply you've read enough of him to "know". http://squawk.ca/lbo- talk/0010/0675.html >...> CB: The rank Genovese has is racist historian of slavery and the South.
(Justin)>...Rubbish. G has become a rather boring neocon, but hsi best work, Roll Jordan Roll, The Political Economy of Slavery, etc., is magnificant. There si not a shred, not a hint of racism, in thwis work,w hether of the variety that Blacks are biologically or culturaly or in any other way inferior. I defy you to find a passage than can be interpreted that way. Show me!...
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http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/02/bschwarz.htm
> ...Slavery, Secession, and Southern History
edited by Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferlenger
University Press of Virginia
229 pages, $49.50/$18.50
A festschrift—a collection of essays written in honor of a venerable, often geriatric, scholar—is nearly always a tome that only a graduate student could love. This one, however, is different—because its topic, slavery, has over the past forty years inspired more brilliant works of American history than any other, because its contributors are some of the most astute scholars exploring that subject, and above all because the man it honors, Eugene D. Genovese, is this country's greatest living historian. Taken together, the essays allow the general reader to grasp the extraordinary variety of approaches and disciplines—ranging from anthropology to theology to econometrics to literary criticism—through which historians have illuminated this complex and anguishing topic. And, along with a lengthy interview with the honoree, they help the layman to grasp Genovese's dazzling achievement. Exceptionally honest and tough-minded, Genovese emerges from this volume as a model intellectual, following the truth wherever it takes him, and for as long as necessary. For example, to fulfill his "lifelong ambition" to write a monumental study of southern slaveholders, he first had to learn everything he could about the slaves. In doing so, Genovese—then a Marxist and, in his own words, "an atheist, a materialist [and] a smart-assed New York intellectual"—was forced to recognize that Christianity was the central element of slave life; despite his biases, he therefore made it the focus of his study. This ten-year "detour" resulted in Roll, Jordan, Roll, the most penetrating work ever written about American slaves (his magnum opus, The Mind of the Master Class, written with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, nears completion). Among Genovese's most striking revelations is the intense and tangled relationship between masters and slaves. Resting on unlimited violence, American slavery commingled intimacy, affection, and dependency with hatred, brutality, and self-contempt. It was all the more terrible for its paradoxes and subtle moral entanglements.
—Benjamin Schwarz
http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue23/lichte23.htm Right Church, Wrong Pew: Eugene Genovese & Southern Conservatism by Alex Lichtenstein
BTW, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was granted an award by Dubya recently, along w/ Midge Decter and Edith Kurzweil of Partisan Review.
http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20031114.html
> ...Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Atlanta, Ga.) is the Eléonore Raoul Professor
> of the Humanities and professor of history at Emory University, where she
> was the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies. Editor of
> The Journal of The Historical Society, she publishes on history and
> literature, public policy, education, religion, culture, and contemporary
> women’s, cultural, and ethical issues. She serves on boards for several
> organizations, including the American Academy for Liberal Education, The
> Historical Society, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the Society
> of Scholars of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. She is
> the author of numerous books, among them Within the Plantation Household:
> Black and White Women of the Old South (1988) and Women and the Future of
> the Family (2000). She also serves on several advisory and editorial
> boards. Educated at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.), the Institut d’Études
> Politiques, and Harvard University (M.A. and Ph.D.), she has received
> numerous fellowships and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian
> Society and the Society of American Historians.
Edith Kurzweil (New York, N.Y.) edited the journal of politics and culture, Partisan Review. Founded and edited for decades by her late husband, William Phillips, Partisan Review assembled in its pages the writings of some of the most prominent writers in the West, often presenting them to the American public for the first time. Partisan Review kept abreast of new developments in politics and culture; for instance, it was one of the earliest English-language journals to publish Czeslaw Milosz. Partisan Review in its last three decades was instrumental in keeping the intellectual and cultural life of the U.S. open to developments in Eastern Europe, and was an important source for readers interested in work emerging from the former Soviet bloc. Edith Kurzweil hosted frequent symposia, which were often published in Partisan Review, and has edited numerous anthologies of classic work from the magazine, such as Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness (1995) and A Partisan Century (1996). She is also the author of Freudians and Feminists (1995), The Age of Structuralism: From Levi-Strauss to Foucault (1996), and The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective (1998).
-- Michael Pugliese