Joel Wendland-Liu
Biographic Data
| ID | 4241868 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Wendland-Liu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Wendland-Liu |
| SIGNATURE | WENDLAND-LIU J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Grand Valley State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0240-8515 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
In Light of 1876
A reading of the American Revolution and the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s early writings provides new insights into his theory of racial monopoly capitalism. Many Americans saw the 1776 revolution as an idealistic fight for liberty, for the slaveholding elite who held disproportionate power within the revolutionary coalition; however, consolidating power and defending their property and expansionist am…
Marxism and Literary Criticism
This article provides a literary biography and intellectual recovery of Edwin Berry Burgum, a prominent Marxist critic whose career was derailed by his 1953 dismissal from New York University during the height of McCarthyism. It explores Burgum’s unique transition from a traditional Victorian scholar to a radical theorist who synthesized New Criticism’s formalist techniques with historical materialism and psychoanalytic principles. The essay cent…
Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland
Philosopher Horace M. Kallen, often linked to Harvard and New York City, had a brief yet noteworthy connection to the Midwest that this engaging intellectual biography unveils. Born in Boston, Kallen is hailed as a pioneer of “cultural pluralism,” a concept he refined throughout his remarkable life. As a strong proponent of a secular American Jewish identity, Kallen's encounters with anti-Semitism, his education under influential liberal thinkers…
Bohemian Bolsheviks
Black Scare in California
Joel Wendland-Liu reviews Armed Struggle?, Gerald Horne's exploration of the state violence and repression that were successfully employed to demolish the Black Panther Party and its influence throughout the 1960s and '70s. Though Horne's recounting, Wendland-Liu writes, we can take powerful lessons about the roles of race and class in the militant drive toward liberation
Shifting the paradigm
In this review of ten years of social innovation research (2012-2022), we define and explore three paradigms in the field: instrumentalist, strong, and democratic. We investigate how language usage and geography play a central role in identifying which paradigms recently published scholarship falls into. While we do not insist that sharp divisions exist between each paradigm, we do find that on the “instrumentalist” side, language tends to abstra…
Everything is Primitive Accumulation
New Biography of "China's First Communist" Reveals Nuances for English-Speaking Readers
Joel Wendland-Liu reviews Li Dazhao: China's First Communist, by Patrick Fuliang Shan (SUNY Press, 2024). This first-ever English-language biography of Li, a founding member of the Communist Party of China, Wendland-Liu writes, contains not only new scholarship but a fresh approach to the life of this revolutionary figure
Travelers of the World Revolution
Chad E. Pearson, 2022. Capital's Terrorists
Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin’s Commune Against Capitalism
Communists and Community
Histories of the Communist Party's role in local political struggles are much needed and deserve careful scrutiny. Communists and Community, a study of Detroit-area communists, promises much in this regard. As an account of the Detroit party's work in the 1940s and 1950s, its author draws our attention to the Party's leadership in the struggle against anti-Black racism. For example, Pettengill's creates strong narratives of the struggle over who …
We Are Here ”
Black-authored self-writing serves as a tool of cultural self-determination and anticipates the concept of “placemaking.” Scholars regard “placemaking” as a process by which people of color struggle to transform space into place, to alter racially segregated spaces into sites of joy, freedom, and political mobilization. This essay evaluates these claims through an exploration of spatial themes in three memoirs: John Edgar Wideman–s Fatheralong (1…
Black Republicans, Natives, and Anti-colonial Resistance in James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings and Andrew J. Blackbird's The History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan
What historian Tiya Miles calls the “settler colonial slavery complex” mediated knotty and contradictory relations among Native peoples and Africans living in the U.S. James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings, a novel about white settler colonialism set in West Michigan, sought to represent a white supremacist-controlling mediation of those relations. The Oak Openings works to project dominant white/U.S. values, ideologies, and cultural construct…
"Out of Death of Slavery"
The goal of this essay is to offer a return to Marx, specifically to Marx's writings on the US Civil War, in order to consider their role in the development of Merxian materialist conception of history. To that end, this reading of Marx's writings on the civil war elicits a definition of class as 1) An objective, dynamic systematic process of expolitation in global capitalism 2) defined concretely in a given space and time by the content, shape a…
Black Utopia
No prominent works on this page.
"Out of Death of Slavery"
The goal of this essay is to offer a return to Marx, specifically to Marx's writings on the US Civil War, in order to consider their role in the development of Merxian materialist conception of history. To that end, this reading of Marx's writings on the civil war elicits a definition of class as 1) An objective, dynamic systematic process of expolitation in global capitalism 2) defined concretely in a given space and time by the content, shape a…
Black Utopia
Black Republicans, Natives, and Anti-colonial Resistance in James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings and Andrew J. Blackbird's The History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan
What historian Tiya Miles calls the “settler colonial slavery complex” mediated knotty and contradictory relations among Native peoples and Africans living in the U.S. James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings, a novel about white settler colonialism set in West Michigan, sought to represent a white supremacist-controlling mediation of those relations. The Oak Openings works to project dominant white/U.S. values, ideologies, and cultural construct…
Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin’s Commune Against Capitalism
Communists and Community
Histories of the Communist Party's role in local political struggles are much needed and deserve careful scrutiny. Communists and Community, a study of Detroit-area communists, promises much in this regard. As an account of the Detroit party's work in the 1940s and 1950s, its author draws our attention to the Party's leadership in the struggle against anti-Black racism. For example, Pettengill's creates strong narratives of the struggle over who …
We Are Here ”
Black-authored self-writing serves as a tool of cultural self-determination and anticipates the concept of “placemaking.” Scholars regard “placemaking” as a process by which people of color struggle to transform space into place, to alter racially segregated spaces into sites of joy, freedom, and political mobilization. This essay evaluates these claims through an exploration of spatial themes in three memoirs: John Edgar Wideman–s Fatheralong (1…
Chad E. Pearson, 2022. Capital's Terrorists
Shifting the paradigm
In this review of ten years of social innovation research (2012-2022), we define and explore three paradigms in the field: instrumentalist, strong, and democratic. We investigate how language usage and geography play a central role in identifying which paradigms recently published scholarship falls into. While we do not insist that sharp divisions exist between each paradigm, we do find that on the “instrumentalist” side, language tends to abstra…
Everything is Primitive Accumulation
New Biography of "China's First Communist" Reveals Nuances for English-Speaking Readers
Joel Wendland-Liu reviews Li Dazhao: China's First Communist, by Patrick Fuliang Shan (SUNY Press, 2024). This first-ever English-language biography of Li, a founding member of the Communist Party of China, Wendland-Liu writes, contains not only new scholarship but a fresh approach to the life of this revolutionary figure
Travelers of the World Revolution
Bohemian Bolsheviks
Black Scare in California
Joel Wendland-Liu reviews Armed Struggle?, Gerald Horne's exploration of the state violence and repression that were successfully employed to demolish the Black Panther Party and its influence throughout the 1960s and '70s. Though Horne's recounting, Wendland-Liu writes, we can take powerful lessons about the roles of race and class in the militant drive toward liberation
In Light of 1876
A reading of the American Revolution and the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s early writings provides new insights into his theory of racial monopoly capitalism. Many Americans saw the 1776 revolution as an idealistic fight for liberty, for the slaveholding elite who held disproportionate power within the revolutionary coalition; however, consolidating power and defending their property and expansionist am…
Marxism and Literary Criticism
This article provides a literary biography and intellectual recovery of Edwin Berry Burgum, a prominent Marxist critic whose career was derailed by his 1953 dismissal from New York University during the height of McCarthyism. It explores Burgum’s unique transition from a traditional Victorian scholar to a radical theorist who synthesized New Criticism’s formalist techniques with historical materialism and psychoanalytic principles. The essay cent…
Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland
Philosopher Horace M. Kallen, often linked to Harvard and New York City, had a brief yet noteworthy connection to the Midwest that this engaging intellectual biography unveils. Born in Boston, Kallen is hailed as a pioneer of “cultural pluralism,” a concept he refined throughout his remarkable life. As a strong proponent of a secular American Jewish identity, Kallen's encounters with anti-Semitism, his education under influential liberal thinkers…
Political science (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (6 works) · Capitalism (4 works) · Democracy (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (4 works) · Race, History, and American Society (4 works)