Professor
Princeton, 1965

Homepage

Office: 3389B Bunche Hall
Phone: (310) 825-3838
Fax: (310) 825-0778
E-mail: evw@ucla.edu

Mailing Address:
UCLA Department of Political Science
4289 Bunche Hall
Box 951472
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472

Curriculum Vitae

Class Websites

Field:

Political Theory and Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Research and Pedagogical Interests:

Victor Wolfenstein works in the Critical Theory Tradition, with a focus on African-American culture and social movements. In The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1981, 1993), he used a theory of the interaction between social classes and psychological groups to analyze white racism and the black liberation struggle. He developed a more general version of this theory in Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (1983) and refined it further through engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy in Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations (2000). These later works add a concern with gender identity to the earlier agenda. His current research is in the area of African-American narrative. A Gift of the Spirit: Reading THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (2007) offers a sustained reconstruction of W. E. B. Du Bois's canonical text. A further study, tentatively titled Talking Books: Toni Morrison Among the Ancestors, extends this exploration of narrative and intersectionality into three works by Toni Morrison: Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz.

Wolfenstein's pedagogical interests both parallel and enlarge those of his research. At the undergraduate level, he teaches the lower division Introduction to Political Theory, along with Ancient Political Theory, African-American Freedom Narratives, Malcolm X and Black Liberation, Marxist Political Theory, and occasional seminars on Plato and Nietzsche. At the graduate level, he focuses on major works of Du Bois, Foucault, Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, along with the related critical literatures

Selected Publications:

"Reflections on Malcolm X and Black Feminism," in Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Volume 3, # 2, 1998.

"Black Liberation and the Jewish Question," in Marcus & Helmreich, eds. Blacks and Jews on the Couch. Praeger-Greenwood Publishers, 1999.

“New Souls for Old?: Race, Gender, and the Transformational Effects of Social Movements,” in Studies in Gender and Sexuality,  Volume 1, #4, 2000.

“Race, Rage, and Oedipus in Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man," in Donald Moss, ed., Hatred in the First Person Plural, Other Press, 2003.

“Recognition and The Souls of Black Folk,” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 7, #s 3-4, Summer/Fall 2005.

“Still Crazy After All These Years: ‘The Paranoid Style in American  Politics’” in The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Volume 3, #2, 2006.

Introduction, Rountable on Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics, in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Volume 9, # 1, January – March 2008.