Black Intellectuals Research Articles

Between Activism, Religiosity, and the Public Sphere: the Intellectual Insurgency of bell hooks

In the collaborative project Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) with Cornel West, when interviewing West, bell hooks traces “the roots of (her) own critical consciousness” to her early experiences in the Black church and with religion in general, to the extent that her role as an intellectual is predicated on “spiritual practice.” It is through this practice that hooks perceives her role as an intellectual as one that “links religiosity to solidarity with the poor,” in a measured effort that avoids what she refers to as “the commodification of religion.” To be sure, this form of commodification limits what an intellectual can and should do, when she views that role within the intersectionality of meaningful activism, critical religiosity, and the engaging of the public sphere. For hooks, an intellectual must be deeply invested in “the kind of compassion, love, and openness” necessary for inclusiveness in the face of increasingly exclusive practices of the Black community, ultimately employed in how larger society devalues and degrades Black women and Black womanhood. Because of this, hooks ascribes to an insurgent intellectualism that, while recognizing her own situatedness between activism, religiosity, and the public sphere, is contingent on a kind of process thought: her intellectual insurgency is always “becoming” and contains a phenomenological intendedness with moving beyond her ontological blackness and epistemological womanhood towards a metaphysical intellectualism and a deontology fundamentally inherent in it. She presents a Black feminist/Womanist thinking into an insurgent Heideggerian-like question of the meaning of being, as both a Black woman and a Black intellectual. To do this, her insurgency in the role of the public intellectualism is grounded on both Frederick Douglass’ notion of “a heavy and cruel hand” (1853) and James Baldwin’s belief that being relatively conscious means “to be in rage almost all the time” (1969).

Black Lesbian Feminist Intellectuals and the Struggle against HIV/AIDS

This essay examines the significance of the work of three black lesbian feminist intellectuals--Cathy Cohen, Evelynn Hammonds, Linda Villarosa--to intellectual genealogies of HIV/AIDS. Since the early era of the AIDS epidemic, these scholars have challenged dominant and indigenous discourses of HIV/AIDS through traditional and public forms of scholarship. Working across an array of disciplines, they have helped us to understand the disproportionate effects of AIDS on black communities not as a matter of “risk” and inherent “deviance,” but as an effect of multiple marginalization. Moreover, these black lesbian feminist intellectuals have challenged some of the prevailing epistemological assumptions about the epidemic: examining how racial, class, gender, and sexual biases shape state and community responses to the epidemic, and the erasure and othering of black women in state and media discourses. Foregrounding the significance of black lesbian feminist identity and politics to their knowledge production, the essay demonstrates how the work of black lesbian feminist intellectuals extends the long history of black health activism into the late 20th and 21st centuries, while stressing the importance of lesbian sexuality to historical examinations of black (women's) intellectual traditions.

Antiblackness in the Hispanic-serving community college (HSCC) context: Black male collegiate experiences through the lens of settler colonial logics

ABSTRACTThis qualitative longitudinal study explored the experiences of Black males attending a public, two-year, community college Hispanic-serving community college (HSCC) in Southern California. Drawing on the perspective of HSCCs as reflecting a colonial relationship between whites and Students of Color, we outline specific forms of anti-Black racism that include the rejection of Black intellectualism, presumed ownership of Blacks’ intellectual and material property, and psychological violence and rejection of Black suffering. We articulate a need for researchers to attend to institutionalized forms of anti-Blackness across structurally diverse institutional contexts – as well as predominantly white ones – and a need to articulate realities that exist outside the ‘settler colonial logics’ that permeate higher education.

Black Skin, Red Masks: Racism, Communism and the Quest of Subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’ Invisible Man

This essay aims at proposing a study of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), where the author focuses on the difficult journey of black intellectuals in quest for a strong black identity in post-war America. The theoretical reflection in this paper is based, in a first phase, on the philosophical and political perspectives of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, whose works and debates have articulated an important source to understand the quest of subjectivity and intellectual consciousness in the 1950s, a period marked not only by the emergence of civil rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also the progressive replacement of Communism by alternative emancipatory currents such as existentialism, postcolonialism and (post-) structuralism. From this discussion, the essay indicates, how (post-) Marxist thinkers, like Etienne Balibar, investigate the limits of the a priori paradigms promoted by the traditional humanistic (natural law-positive law) and communist narratives (alienation-emancipation), which lack conceptual and historical efficacy when it comes to understand and respond to new (bio-capitalist) forms of discrimination, which constantly evolve according to the epoch and the place.

JOSÉ CORREIA LEITE, EDUARDO DE OLIVEIRA, EDUARDO DE OLIVEIRA E OLIVEIRA – MILITANTES DO MOVIMENTO NEGRO DE SÃO PAULO NO SÉCULO XX

TThis text intends to present the life stories of black intellectuals, who were important in the black activism, in the city of São Paulo in the 1980 and are little known or referenced by the younger generations of the movement and the intellectuality. From Mário de Andrade, we went through the trajectory of three black intellectuals: José Correia Leite, Eduardo de Oliveira and Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira. They are references in the twentieth century for the consolidation of a space of activism, transformed into the propeller of the achievements reached in the following years.

Políticas públicas de educación afrocolombiana: el arte de escamotear el derecho de los pueblos

El artículo se ocupa de describir los momentos en que el Estado colombiano ha legislado para los pueblos de ancestro africano, especialmente en materia de derechos educativos. También mostrará que las leyes específicas para estas comunidades de manera contradictoria no gozan de una estrategia de promoción por parte del Estado y por el contrario se han naturalizado en un doble juego de inclusión-negación, esto es, el derecho de los negros es parte de la normatividad pero no se aplica en la práctica. Se postula aquí que la inclusión de las comunidades Afro a las políticas educativas del Estado responde a una estrategia de desmovilización e intento de cierre de los procesos reivindicativos. No obstante, pese a la visión colonial y racista que marca de forma permanente el desempeño de las elites colombianas, desde el siglo XIX emergen grupos de intelectuales negros que han logrado influir de manera significativa en los procesos de reclamación de una educación enderezada a revitalizar las construcciones sociales, políticas y culturales de los afrocolombianos. La apertura a la diversidad cultural de la Constitución política de 1991 es leída aquí como estrategia del multiculturalismo de Estado.

Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt

Reviewed by: Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt Brandy Thomas Wells Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. Edited by Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. vi, 244. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1365-7.) Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective joins a reinvigorated conversation about black intellectuals and their complex range of ideas. This interdisciplinary book moves beyond the common discussion of popular liberals, who are most visible during frenzied moments, to the margins, where radical, feminist, Marxist, and conservative black intellectuals have largely been cast. Expanding the theoretical and historical underpinnings of black intellectualism, the volume aims to "complicate how black intellectualism is academically and popularly understood" (p. 9). Gregory D. Smithers opens the text with an overview of black intellectual thought from the late eighteenth century to World War II. Smithers explains that from the 1800s, black intellectualism was rooted in Christianity, abolitionism, and liberal ideas, broadly defined. This tradition was joined by other forms of thinking, including black Marxism and black feminism. As black intellectuals sought to mitigate the complexities of race and racism and to accomplish their own aspirations, they remained a diverse and complex group. In providing readers with "a genealogy of black Marxism," Minkah Makalani challenges a discussion that has often been limited to the Communist Party of the United States during the Cold War (p. 38). After providing a rich historiography of black Marxist writing and thought, Makalani follows Frantz Fanon in stretching the definition of Marxism to make room for discourses on coloniality. Readers are introduced to Amílcar Cabral, whose thinking did not stop at imperialism but also addressed cultural revolution. Makalani closes the essay by considering the abandonment of this cultural nationalism in the sectarian turn in U.S. black Marxism. Brian D. Behnken's essay broadly considers black liberalism. Behnken grants attention to the life work of James W. C. Pennington, Carter G. Woodson, and Marion Thompson Wright, since scholarly activity was considered the best means of changing white perspectives. If black liberals' desires could be summarized as possessing a singular goal, Behnken makes clear that "racial change was it" (p. 81). Even so, Behnken rightly shows that black liberalism has undergone many iterations and defies neat categorization. Danielle L. Wiggins provides what could be called a companion essay to the preceding chapter. Correcting a false view that the black conservative tradition began after the civil rights era, Wiggins uncovers a "conservative radicalism" from the time of seventeenth-century black thinkers (p. 111). Although the number of black conservatives declined during the New Deal, Wiggins shows that this intellectual tradition remained deeply rooted. In the 1970s and 1980s, black neoconservatives "united in a shared critique of American liberalism and [End Page 493] the active role of the state" in black life (p. 115). Though marginally accepted among the New Right, black neoconservatives have shaped the parameters of discussions of black culture, education, welfare, and affirmative action. In an enthralling essay, Benita Roth turns her attention to black feminist intellectuals. She examines the views and arguments of black women communists concerning the triple exploitation faced by black women. The arguments of Claudia Jones and others were resurrected in the 1950s and 1960s, as black feminist scholars, through writing and organization, challenged racial and gender oppressions. In weighing Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's recognition of intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the need for a "Say Her Name" campaign, Roth well articulates that no matter how consistent this intellectual tradition has been, many black feminists have been rendered invisible, as if there is only room for a few luminaries at once. Simon Wendt analyzes black nationalist thought from the 1950s through the 1990s by paying attention to black "paraintellectuals," thinkers who reached larger audiences by speaking and writing about black politics from their lived rather than learned experiences (p. 171). This contribution highlights the predicaments and complexities of these thinkers, who attempted to create postcolonial ideologies that were inextricably linked to Anglo...

Radical Resistance: Constructions of a Transnational Self in Angela Davis's and Cynthia McKinney’s Memoirs

Author(s): Linke, Gabriele | Abstract: To achieve a better understanding of the dynamic transnationalism at work in African American politics since the 1960s, this study compares the life narratives by Angela Davis and Cynthia McKinney, two transnationally active radical Black intellectuals known for their fierce opposition to mainstream US politics. Davis’s An Autobiography was first published in 1974, McKinney’s memoir Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom in 2013, which means that the texts were conceived at different points in African American, US and world history. Despite the temporal distance between the two autobiographical texts, they show some fundamental similarities in the construction of the self as both authors on the one hand evoke the history of slavery and slave resistance as their political ‘pedigree’ while on the other hand they emphasize their transnational perspective. They foreground political struggle and intellectual analysis rather than elaborating the details of personal life. Major differences arise from their different positions with regard to the political establishment. While Davis presents her life story as representative of the fight for Black liberation and Civil Rights, former Congresswoman McKinney describes herself as an uncompromising outsider and lone voice of resistance to mainstream US politics. As she targets government lies, she supports the credibility of her own stories by the excessive use of documents from photographs through hate mails to Congressional records, making her own activism transparent. Her outlook with regard to peace, justice, and the role of the Unites States in the world is, however, less optimistic than Angela Davis’s after her release from prison in 1974.

A Conversation With Janet Burroway

A Conversation With Janet Burroway Jocelyn Cullity (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 117] Janet Burroway, Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for writing by the Florida Humanities Council, is the author of eight novels, including Eyes, The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone, and Bridge of Sand, in addition to collected poetry and essays. Her plays include Medea with Child, Sweepstakes, Parts of Speech, and most recently Headshots. She has published the children's books The Truck on the Track, The Giant Jam Sandwich, and The Perfect Pig, all of which have been scored for orchestra. Her most recent book is the memoir Losing Tim: The Life and Death of an American Contractor in Iraq. Her widely used textbooks are Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft and Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. She is married to film and utopian scholar Peter Ruppert. [End Page 118] JOCELYN CULLITY: You were born in Tucson and raised in Phoenix but never felt quite at home. JANET BURROWAY: Mine was a very '40s/'50s childhood, with much emphasis on being a pretty girl and a good Christian. Really, I was neither, and these failures were a grief to my mother and consequently a grief to me. On the looks side, I had stubbornly straight hair, poor posture, and I was what was then called "stocky." By the time I grew up and slimmed down, and the still later time straight hair came into fashion, the damage had been done. I was socially awkward, fretful, and fearful of failure. I was no better at goodness than prettiness. What I mainly remember about church were the pink wintergreens my grandmother slipped me to keep me from fidgeting during the sermon and how untouchably hot the car was when we got in it to go home—it having sat in the hundred-degree Arizona sun for a few hours. I was both pious and rebellious, a very difficult combination for my parents. At the same time—and from the same impulses, really—my mother groomed me in public recitation. So I learned an early pattern in which I was ambitious to do well, then terrified, then, when the moment to speak arrived, accepted the inevitable and opened my mouth and was afterward rewarded with extravagant praise. "Saying pieces" at Friday-night Methodist socials or for the Women's Society for Christian Service became a template for teaching and giving readings. The terror later somewhat subsided in a way that let me better see my students and my audiences. CULLITY: In the 1950s you were in your late teens and early twenties, studying literature at Barnard, Cambridge, Yale. You've written that at that time writers felt they could change the world and that there was real power in the written word. You met many writers who would go on to fame, including the poet Sylvia Plath, who described you as a "lively American girl," someone who often crossed your path in America and England. Could you tell us a bit about that heady time? BURROWAY: It was a time of self-discovery—for me, for the Beats, for a counterculture that still called itself Bohemian, for black intellectuals. It was a whole decade before the '60s erupted in louder and more organized ways, so we were struggling, flailing even, and in many ways I was among the backward, having grown up in a self-satisfied Christian, [End Page 119] Southwestern home. I had a lucky childhood, but the things that were wrong with the '50s were wrong with it: repression, bigotry, a puny morality—and I was unhappily, confusedly aware of these. I got to New York in 1955 as a "guest editor" on Mademoiselle magazine's contest. I was the youngest of the twenty young women there for the month of June (we called ourselves girls or gals), just after my freshman year at the University of Arizona. Also in that group were Jane Truslow, who later married Sylvia Plath's former boyfriend Peter Davison; novelist and food writer Gael Greene; designer Adri Steckling—and Joan...

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Reviewed by: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart Jovonna Jones The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. By Jeffrey C. Stewart. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 944 pp. Illustrations, notes, select bibliography, index. $39.95.) "I am not a race problem," the first African American Rhodes scholar wrote to his mother back home in Philadelphia (105). The budding philosopher Alain Locke had just won the prestigious award during his final year at Harvard College in 1907. But he felt burdened by the task to represent the race. He resented black organizations across the East Coast who claimed his win as their own and the northern white newspapers who lauded him as an example of proper racial progress. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke," he declared in his letter, "and if these people don't stop I'll tell them something that will make them" (105). [End Page 226] Jeffrey C. Stewart has carefully mined Alain Locke's personal papers at Howard University to illustrate a complex portrait of the intellectual leader. The biography is organized in three major parts: "The Education of Alain Locke," "Enter the New Negro," and "Metamorphosis," each constructed through short episodic chapters. All episodes provide a detailed look into how Locke's philosophy of black aesthetics developed, from the domestic adornments of black Victorianism performed by his mother at the turn of the century, to the problem of the "primitive" and the "folk" in Western modernism, to the fight for more institutions and criticism to support black artists into the postwar period. One of the more refreshing contributions of this biography is Stewart's return to Locke's famed New Negro philosophy in the context of a more complicated psychic milieu. The New Negro philosophy—a charge to eclipse stereotypes and struggle with complexity and pleasure—was Locke's way of advocating for aesthetics in the world of black intellectualism and white patronage. The New Negro provided a framework for a spiritual and political engagement with black arts and letters so that a new generation of artists—like Locke's mentees and students Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston—could be received and supported in their full complexity with blackness as their inspiration, not as a problem to be solved. If W. E. B Du Bois wanted art to be used as propaganda for "gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy," Alain Locke, as Stewart writes, "wanted a drama that showed Black folk could already love and enjoy despite the terror of racism" (277, italics my own). Du Bois's approach was ultimately compromised by his condescension toward the black masses and toward artists deemed too risky for the racial cause. Locke's ideology held its own conflicts, too. His approach to art and life appeared exploitative and contradictory, informed by a colonial obsession with African artifacts and a cultural claim to tradition yet driven by a cosmopolitan desire for pure, ahistorical forms. But Locke's true impulse behind the New Negro often defied the political and intellectual discourse of the time, perhaps strategically so. Locke already knew what it felt like to balance respectability and transgression in his own life. As a black gay man long affirmed and cautioned by his doting mother, Locke was keenly aware of the constraints upon his freedom to experience intimacy and inspiration without the threat of being ostracized due to race and sexuality. Locke desired from black aesthetics the grammars and spaces to live the full breadth of his desires, fears, and experiences. This quality made him not only a leader of thought but a mentor who could see and affirm the black artists working the same vein. "I supposed some of us erotic lads," the budding poet Countee Cullen wrote in a letter to his new mentor Locke, "were placed here just to eat our hearts out with longing for unattainable things, especially for that friendship beyond understanding." Locke and Cullen both desired a freedom possible not through [End Page 227] political discourse or even through social acceptance but through a black art of living on new terms—sometimes unspeakable terms—that...

‘We the ladies … have been deprived of a voice’: Uncovering Black Women’s Lives through the Colored Conventions Archive

This article will investigate how African American women’s experience with education informed the Colored Conventions movement and propose that they used education activism as an avenue to gain and normalize official participation in convention proceedings. From its inception in 1830, the Colored Conventions movement was preoccupied with political and economic uplift and self-help. With these aims in mind, delegates focused on education, specifically mechanical training for men. Throughout the nineteenth century, Black male activists articulated their entitlement to basic rights in gendered terms. The discourse on civil and political rights among Black intellectuals and activists overlapped with discourses of manhood. Consequently, the archives of the Colored Conventions movement overwhelmingly represent Black male voices while Black women’s concerns and struggles were relegated to the margins and, at times, assumed to be secondary to the needs of their male counterparts. Women’s activism did not garner the same support or attention from convention delegates even as Black women and girls faced the same severe impediments as men and boys. Although the convention minutes often say very little about Black women’s participation, it would be remiss to say that it was negligible. The article will show that these minutes can be read productively, highlighting ways we can uncover narratives of Black women and how they navigated a male-centric movement and asserted their public roles. Before being allowed to take the pulpit in these conventions, Black women’s voices had to be mediated through male delegates. While Henry Highland Garnet’s radicalism is often noted because of his fiery speech, ‘An Address to the Slave of the United States’, in an 1843 convention, historians have overlooked his wife Julia Williams Garnet whose experiences with violence informed the couple’s radicalism and advocacy for urgent action. Similarly, the injustice that Frederick Douglass’s daughter Rosetta faced as she enrolled in a boarding school found its way on to the convention floor, giving women attendees and first-time delegates a leeway to centre women’s concerns. This article, therefore, will explore how the Colored Conventions archives reveal how Black women challenged and expanded the parameters of Black womanhood in the nineteenth century.

Philosophies or Phonographies? On the Political Stakes of Theorizing About and Through “Music”

ABSTRACT This article compares two different ways twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars use music or sound as a model of abstraction. The methods common in academic philosophy are conceptually flawed: they use an audiovisual litany to misrepresent the difference between methods of abstraction as the difference between sight and hearing. They are also politically flawed: they intensify and renaturalize philosophy's historical exclusion of scholarship by black intellectuals and rearticulate philosophy's traditional enclosure of the intellectual commons. In contrast, the phonographic methods common in Africana thought ground their concepts of sound not in opposition to sight or vision but in black aesthetics and expressive traditions. Avoiding both binary litanies and racialized, gendered practices of enclosure, phonographic methods are better models for theorizing about and through sound.

Os homens de cor invisíveis da imprensa negra paulistana: como a biografia de um intelectual negro nascido no século dezenove auxilia a repensar a historiografia do pós-abolição paulistano

O presente texto aborda aspectos históricos e historiográficos do pós-abolição a partir dos jornais da imprensa negra paulistana. Existentes desde pelo menos o final do século dezenove, os jornais negros de São Paulo foram considerados mais combativos a partir da segunda década do século vinte. A relevância bibliográfica atribuída a esse último período ofuscou a luta de ativistas dos decênios anteriores, cuja herança documental é menos acessível. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir acerca das possibilidades para se contornar o problema da ausência dos jornais negros paulistanos nos primeiros anos do século vinte. Desse modo, a investigação biográfica sobre intelectuais negros nascidos em fins do século dezenove – por vezes ainda sob o jugo da escravidão – e que foram atuantes sobretudo nos anos imediatamente posteriores a abolição faz compreender a experiência negra antirracista interligada entre ambos os períodos históricos.

South–South Organizing in the Global Plantation Zone: Ramón Marrero Aristy, the novela de la caña, and the Caribbean Bureau

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes a theory of the elided interwar novela de la caña (sugarcane novel), arguing that the genre participates in a transnational political exchange and cosmopolitics in which it uses regional contexts to examine global capitalist relations. Specifically, many of these works parallel the discourse of the understudied Caribbean Bureau of the Communist International. The Caribbean Bureau attempted to create workers’ movements on US-owned sugar plantations and, due to the efforts of black American intellectuals, aimed to respond to issues facing black labor, including Haitian and West Indian migrant labor. Using Dominican novelist Ramón Marrero Aristy’s controversial novel Over (1939) as a case study, the essay considers how some novels within this broader genre parallel Comintern discourse. That is, they consider the bridging of anti-capitalist organizing with racial justice struggles and meditate on the possibilities and limitations of an alternative world relation to global capitalism. While recent scholarship and literature on so-called South–South organizing – organizing among subaltern groups across national, linguistic, racial, and ethnic lines – tends to examine solidarity in the face of shared experiences of oppression, Marrero Aristy’s Over pivots in a different direction by presenting a self-conscious critique of the difficulties of forging transnational, translinguistic, and transracial political collectivities.

The Public Is Intellectual

This article is a discussion and critique of public intellectualism in the present. Rather than reify a self-aggrandized form of public intellectualism within academia that centers individualized intellectual development and that encourages a greater flow of findings outward to communities, I highlight black women public intellectuals who have used their skills, talents, and station within the university and society in novel ways. Moreover, I suggest that scholars take seriously the questions, research methods, and analyses emerging from the general public, particularly from within communal and political organizations. These encouragements are illustrated by highlighting three political education workshops that have been developed across the United States.

A liberal history of a radical movement

ABSTRACTThe Making of Black Lives Matters reaches across a number of Black intellectuals and activists to identify common ground that could birth a Black Lives Matter (BLM movement), but its choice of thinkers and Lebron’s interpretation fail to produce a radical enough historiography to help readers fully engage with the emergence of the BLM movement. In response to Lebron’s text, I take up three central concerns: (1) the audience for the book, (2) which/who’s BLM movement?, and (3) the historical antecedents to BLM. The thinkers and concepts in the volume provide insight into the Black Freedom Struggle in general but do not elucidate the particular paths to or the contours of the BLM movement. The complex intersecting and interlocking agendas of BLM deserve a more radical undergirding to help readers understand the significance of the current movement relative to the past.

‘I must speak, I must think, I must act.’ [Laura Simmes, 1864] the Christian Recorder, literary activism, and the black female intellectual

ABSTRACTDuring the American Civil War, black women increasingly published opinion pieces in the form of letters, short essays, and, in one case, serialised fiction in the African Methodist Episcopal newspaper, The Christian Recorder. This article argues that, collectively, these women’s voices contributed to a developing black intellectualism of the early nineteenth century, setting the precedent for black feminist thinking of the Reconstruction period and beyond. Through their public literary activism, these women challenged the boundaries of the gendered and racialised spaces of the public and private spheres. Through a series of case studies published in the Christian Recorder from 1861 to 1866, this article reflects on the ways in which these women developed a conscious writing self which should be understood as literary activism. These women wrote under the most difficult of circumstances in a period of conflict, yet they persisted in having their voices heard. Collectively, they wrote about the importance of action, the influence of women on the African American nation, and the vital influence of women’s role in education for racial uplift. This article thus places the literary activism of these women front and centre and highlights the power of their words for subsequent generations.

Decolonialidade, Atlântico Negro e intelectuais negros brasileiros: em busca de um diálogo horizontal

Resumo Baseado nas contribuições dos teóricos da decolonialidade e em diálogo com a tradição dos estudos do Atlântico Negro, o artigo, em busca de uma justiça cognitiva, propõe um diálogo horizontal e equitativo entre estas correntes do pensamento político-acadêmico e os intelectuais negros brasileiros. Para o desenvolvimento deste argumento, radicalizamos o compromisso do projeto decolonial com a corpo-geopolítica do conhecimento, bem como propomos uma maior ênfase nas raízes, mais do que nas rotas, dos estudos sobre o Atlântico Negro. Esta afirmação da corpo-geopolítica do conhecimento e das raízes é a chave tanto para a afirmação ontológica e epistemológica das populações negras quanto para construirmos um diálogo pluriversal e transmoderno, no qual as experiências particulares não se percam nem num provincianismo nem num universo abstrato.

Memoirs of “When the Negro was in Vogue”: Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism and the African American Autobiographical Tradition

Memoirs of “When the Negro was in Vogue”: Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism and the African American Autobiographical Tradition

Memoirs of "When the Negro was in Vogue": Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism and the African American Autobiographical Tradition

Memoirs of "When the Negro was in Vogue": Langston Hughes, Black Intellectualism and the African American Autobiographical Tradition