In a Shade of Blue arrives with a number of endorsements that raise expectation levels extremely high. Its author has been heralded by the likes of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West as the young African American intellectual of the moment. Such talk, of course, invariably serves to sharpen academic knives.

This work, however, mostly lives up to the hype. In a Shade of Blue is an impressive synthesis of ideas drawn from postwar African American literature, black Christian theology and the author's own very broad philosophical home turf. Each engagement, moreover, serves to fortify a sharp, timely and inspiring thesis aimed at nothing less than reshaping the political consciousness of a post-boomer generation of African Americans. It is the sense of generational schism registered here that gives the work its political as well as intellectual force. Glaude boldly announces that the politics of the civil rights era should be abandoned. More specifically, its elevation of the “heroic leader” bearing the burden of “racial custodianship” should be replaced by a new “post-soul politics” of democratic deliberation rooted in contemporary African American realities.

Rejecting the “retrospective” impulse that champions “top-down” political reflexes, Glaude turns to the future-oriented, “prospective” pragmatism of John Dewey. In doing so he skilfully redescribes, in historical and contemporary contexts, the tragic predicament of blacks as America's resilient “blues people.” Some further consideration of the responses of earlier African American thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, however, might have been useful. This would have alerted the reader to the ways in which points of racial crisis in American history have invariably served to expose the inadequacy of pragmatism. The pragmatist notoriously seeks to overcome “irresolvable” questions by putting them to one side, but what about those questions – such as slavery or civil rights – that refuse to remain there?

Yet, as Glaude notes, however important the arguments generated by affirmative action or Hurricane Katrina, it is hard to make the case that these represent similar moments of crisis for a present generation. What, for instance, Glaude asks, is achieved by a mayor today invoking the Alabama of 1965 in a public meeting arranged to discuss gang-related violence? Too many African American public figures continue to speak a dead political language, lost in a fog of analogy that only confounds the best efforts of those who wish to understand the problems they face in their own terms. This is a bold, rewarding book that, alongside forcing pragmatists to recontextualize the tradition, should also prompt black activists to reclaim a pragmatic method better designed to address twenty-first-century problems.