Black Intellectuals Research Articles

Mending the Red-Black Thread: Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Robinson Thesis

Cedric Robinson's increasingly popular and influential work Black Marxism is best understood as a project of post-Marxist critique. Robinson's book, now regarded as a classic, asks a series of important questions of Marxism, but each of its major arguments marks a fundamental departure from the theoretical perspectives of both European and Black Marxists. The book exists in a historical moment of crisis for the left and intellectual retreat from Marxism; Robinson's relationship with Marxism and his place in the political tradition to which he gave a name, the Black Radical Tradition, suggests three main arguments. First, Robinson's critiques of the classical Marxist tradition — focused on its apparent economism and Eurocentrism — are based on a flattening of this tradition and a marked break from Marxist methodology. Second, Robinson's critique does not neatly align with the perspectives of the radical Black intellectuals whom he discusses, and indeed his conclusions are frequently in conflict with them. Third, the emancipatory project of Black Studies and the research programs convened under Robinson's influence will be best served by cautious and critical engagements with Robinson's seminal work. The generative questions that Robinson asks will be better answered through a materialist account of Black history, a syncretic understanding of Black culture, and a nonreductive, revolutionary Marxism providing the guide for political action.

Black Internationalism and Shakespeare and Company

In the interwar period, Paris became home to a network of Black writers and artists from around the world. Using data from the Shakespeare and Company Project, as well as various archival sources, this article reveals connections between this network and Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library. The article begins with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Gwendolyn Bennett, arguing that her relationship with Shakespeare and Company illuminates a porousness between the “Lost Generation” and “Paris Noir.” The article then examines how Beach connected writing from Harlem to Black intellectuals in Paris, who were in the process of creating a new anti-colonial articulation of race.

From Brazil to The Planet: politics of race in the american black press

In the passage of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Brazilian and American Black intellectuals expressed their views on racial disputes over the Black press. This article evaluates views of Black politics in the U.S. and Brazil as an essential grounding of the struggle for civil rights, understanding the past of both countries as emerging from a collective experience of discrimination. The primary sources are the letters written by J. S. Moore, an African American intellectual who lived in Bahia, Brazil. Moore addressed his writings to newspapers such as the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and particularly the Richmond Planet. His critics' articles debated directly with editors from 1917 to the 1930s. The dialogue between the American continents also sheds light on Brazilians’ racial issues. It gives us a more complex perspective of the global fight against racism and makes it possible to understand the potential choices for resistance among diasporic societies.

Feeling Brown, Thinking Black: Translating the Black Panther from Lowndes to Bombay

Abstract: The archive of exchanges between Dalit and Black intellectuals exhibits the significance of imagining and translating minoritarian relations in the late twentieth century. The formation of the Dalit Panthers—an anticaste organization that declared its affiliation to the Black Panther Party in 1973—presents one such translational moment, revealing the affective power of brown/ness in consolidating minoritarian worlds that are concomitantly conceived in their opposition to coloniality, caste, and white supremacy. I trace the evolution of the Panthers' relationship through the journey of its iconography, from its initial sketching in Lowndes to its circulation in Marathi little magazines in the 1970s and its reappearance in Rahee Punyashloka's print series The Panthers Is an Elusive Beast (2021).

‘I Have Been Faithful to Thee, Cynara’: Parodying Canonical Pro-Slavery Novel in The Wind Done Gone

Parody, as a specific case of adaptation and intertextuality, is not only burlesquing background text but also creating a critical distance through superimposition strategies. This paper sought to show the parodic means performed in the novel The Wind Done Gone (TWDG) written by Alice Randall. It was meant to be a parody of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (GWTW) and has intertextuality with other literary works. The interconnection of the novel's narrative strategies and its effort to attach historical reassessment suggested a trustworthy reality of the black slave experience. Randall effectively deconstructed and reconstructed the black experience and identity, as well as dismantled the racist representation in the canonical novel GWTW. Enslaved black people are transformed into dominants as active agents and intelligent, creating a beautiful mulatto, tagging black intellectuals in American history and the new Negroes, naming ties, and providing verbatim quotes to revisit the stereotype and cultural misconstruction against black Americans. Randall seemed not to alter the meta-history of slavery but rather to show the irony of the racist discourse in the canonical saga and other popular media.

Louis-Joseph Janvier & “Os detratores da raça negra”: Crítica antropológica

Abstract Ideas of hierarchy, inferiority and racial inequality predominated in the work of certain European intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries on the idea of ‘races’. The Société d’Ethnologie de Paris (SEP) and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (SAP) are two French institutions that had intellectuals who participated in the consolidation of these conceptions. Since the 18th century there have been criticism by black intellectuals; however, with the emergence of the First Black Republic of the modern era in Haiti, these criticisms gained new contours. Many Haitian intellectuals in the first and second half of the 19th century dedicated themselves to combating hierarchical ways of thinking, demonstrating their inconsistencies. In this article, based on bibliographical research, we consider the anthropological work of the Haitian Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911), highlighting his contribution to struggles toward deconstructing the imaginary of racial inferiority attributed to black people and used to legitimize their domination and exploitation. Discussing the racial issue in Janvier’s thinking is relevant as it continues to be a dilemma and a challenge in the contemporary world.

Re(cover)ing Revelations: Formulating Black Ancestral Text Analysis in Education Research

Traditional research on Blackness in education often renders Black people nonhuman (Wynter, 1994). In this article, we formulate Black ancestral text analysis, a qualitative research method in which Black thinkers excavate the ancestral knowledges offered in intellectual texts. Our method rejects the white gaze of counting and condemning Black people in education research by reflecting on Black interiority and analyzing the texts that Black intellectuals produce. This article offers a set of research protocol questions to guide an analysis of how Black thinkers re(cover) un/seen, embodied, and alternative knowledges from multigenre historical and literary texts. Through this qualitative approach, we gather information about the texts, including knowledge about the story, the storyteller/storytelling, and the storage (the archival collection). Further, through deep meditation, we come to understand ancestral knowledge, or alternative forms of knowledge when reflecting on the un/seen and the silences in texts. Black ancestral text analysis emerged from a curiosity to explore alternative forms of knowledge and recovery in education research. We present an example of this ancestral knowledge excavation process using Wynter’s critique of the inner eye, school curriculum, student activism outlined in news articles, and Alvin Ailey’s (1960) “Revelations.” We conclude with a discussion of the communal obligations and ethical commitments of abstracting alternative knowledges within Black education research.

Underground Topography of the Political Unconscious in Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison

Coming from different socio-economic backgrounds but sharing the experience of being black intellectuals in the US before the Civil Rights movement, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison met in New York in 1937. Although they eventually grew distant, their friendship generated some of the most important political writings of African-American literature. They were interested in the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx for possible solutions to the “Negro question.” They argued for a Freudo-Marxist synthesis as a remedy for the broken black psyche under white supremacist pressure. With its dimension on American racism, the synthesis they proposed offers a distinct and important contribution to the dominantly European canon of the theory. This article investigates the political psychoanalysis of Wright and Ellison as represented in their ideationally interlinked novels, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (2021). It analyses how their novelistic writing emerges as a dynamic space to elaborate upon a political psychoanalysis through their own race-based version of a theoretical synthesis. Moreover, the study also offers a new approach to new material, as Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground remained unpublished until it was recently rediscovered and printed for the first time in 2021.

André Rebouças Beyond the Atlantic: The Racism and Sociability Network of a Black Nineteenth-Century Engineer

Abstract In this article, we analyse the intellectual trajectory of André Pinto Rebouças (1838-1898) between 1870 and 1888, and how he problematised the relation between education, technology, and social reform. Rebouças argued that access to land and technical education were the mechanisms of upward mobility for black people and European immigrants. He was an engineer, teacher, businessman, abolitionist, journalist, and man of science. His family, intellectual, and professional trajectory was permeated by an extensive sociability network and racial barriers, both within and outside Brazil. Rebouças was a spokesman for the social concerns of his time, particularly those which affected not only the productive sector, but the living conditions and survival of non-white people. The relevance of this work is to add reflections to the history of science and black intellectuals.

Cultural Identity and Racism

This paper delves into the intricate relationship between cultural identity, racism, and the various factors shaping these dynamics, particularly within the context of the United States. Cultural identity is explored as a pivotal aspect of individual and collective existence, profoundly influenced by racial constructs and historical legacies. Racism, deeply embedded in societal structures, is identified as a significant impediment to fostering harmonious cultural relations. This paper emphasizes the critical role played by films, academic works, artworks, and increased cultural diversity in shaping and improving cultural identities. Examining the concept of race, the paper underscores its historical and cultural underpinnings, pointing out its impact on societal divisions and inequalities. Stuart Hall, who promoted Afro-Caribbean cultural identity through cinema, is discussed. Cultural practices, historical events, and film depictions of the Black experience are examined as crucial to cultural identity maintenance and rediscovery. The paper also emphasizes race diversity and Black intellectuals' role in cultural reshaping. Cultural identity is complex, and double consciousness and Black Atlantic diaspora experiences are crucial. Music is especially effective at expressing cultural diaspora and continuity. Jazz and contemporary Black art movements helped shape cultural identity. The paper argues that art, intellectual pursuits, and written history help people feel connected and understand diverse cultures. Despite these positive influences, racism still hinders cultural identity, the paper says. The paper argues that cultural identities must be preserved by avoiding racism and promoting cultural relativity. Lack of cultural integration also erodes cultural identities. The paper concludes by emphasizing cultural identity preservation and recommends a multidisciplinary approach involving media, history, academia, and art for overcoming racism to promote diversity and cultural integration.

Sentence Versus Redemption and the ‘Spiritual World’ in Osiris Rising, Fragments, Why Are We So Blest? KMT: In the House of Life by Ayi Kwei Armah and Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

This paper attempts to evaluate the different characteristics in the spiritual world that act on human destiny in blacks ‘cosmology in Ayi Kwei Armah and Gloria Naylor’s fiction while justifying the awareness of black intellectuals in their different approaches to sentence and redemption for African cultural revival. It also exposes black people facing acculturation phenomena and the deconstruction of the ancestral home. However, it argues that the achievement of the struggle for African cultural revival will be possible if they take the initiative in finding out specific strategies that would culturally, socially and politically reconnect black with their indigenous cultural reality. Some of these stratagems include good cultural references, rootedness, unity, teaming work, and rationality. To examine blacks’ spirituality in its double vocation of sentence and redemption, this study uses theories of anti-colonialists and Afro-centrists that advocate total liberation and empowerment of black people while assessing the issues of the disgrace of both African and African-American people. Similarly, the insights and commitment of thinkers like Afro-centrists are well considered as additional elements in this work. Ultimately, the novels contend that in African spirituality there is a divine will owed to the ancestors that have the mission of watching over their people and judging them in several ways when they are satisfied through rituals or recognition. As the authors of the three books suggest, the appreciation of ancestral legacy and cultural advancement is an effective means of ensuring blacks ‘social welfare in their communities and elsewhere.

Brazilian Black Librarianship

In Brazil, only recently has Brazilian Black Librarianship (Biblioteconomia Negra Brasileira in Portuguese; BNB) experienced renewed interest as an intellectual, professional and bibliographic movement that ranges from professional training and performance to theoretical and epistemological reflections on the critical reflections produced by Black librarians, as well as research on ethnic and racial issues, socioeconomic conditions, and the Black population within Library and Information Science (Biblioteconomia e Ciência da Informação in Portuguese; BCI). This article presents the BNB movement through its history, praxis, and curricular transformation of the library profession in the context of the epistemologies produced by Black librarians in Brazil. The justification for this study lies in debating how LIS as a field promotes and reproduces whiteness and the death of knowledge of Black librarians (and librarians belonging to non-white ethnic and racial groups), resulting in the exclusion of this knowledge in libraries, praxis, and librarian education training. In other words, whiteness in Brazilian librarianship is instituted as an exercise in epistemicide, nullifying or hiding other epistemologies. For the socio-critical construction of the framework of this research, we analyzed of books, articles, theses, dissertations, annals of scientific events in the field, and manuals published in the period from 1987 to 2020. Such information sources were drawn from databases, websites of scientific events, class councils and professional associations, graduate programs in information science, and the Brazilian platform for researchers' curricula, Currículo Lattes. In this theoretical framework, we sought to uncover the way that Brazilian LIS education promotes Eurocentric (white) thinking and renders racial debate and Black intellectuals invisible, drawing from the philosophies of Grada Kilomba, Sueli Carneiro and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Anchored in these theoretical references from different areas of knowledge, we debate the fight against the epistemicide of Black thought within the scope of scientific production in Brazilian librarianship. Finally, we bring the profile of Black Brazilian librarians and their performance with ethnic-racial issues, and the scientific production of Black librarians at BNB that gave rise to the movement to introduce Black epistemologies in LIS. The conclusion points to critical perspectives that bring the discussion on race to the center of the field and the formation of a Brazilian tradition of theories and methods through the struggles and resistance of the country's Black communities. Pre-print first published online 7/17/2023

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

David A. Varel. The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of a Pullman porter and a housewife, Lawrence D. Reddick (1910–1995) became an important historian, archivist, librarian, and activist who played key roles in promoting African American history and pursuing civil rights. In this well-written and meticulously researched first biography of Reddick, David Varel argues that as an advisor and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., “Reddick shaped the policy decisions of the [civil rights] movement’s highest leadership” (8). Varel also demonstrates that “Reddick’s lifelong crusade for black history—for a useable past—was the centerpiece of his larger struggle for black empowerment” (12). Reddick’s path in life was set at Fisk University, where he earned BA and MA degrees, studying under such prominent Black intellectuals as Lorenzo Turner, Horace Mann Bond, Charles S. Johnson, and Arturo Schomburg. During the 1930s, Reddick taught history at Kentucky State Industrial College and Dillard University, serving as Department of History chair, and earned a PhD in history at the University of Chicago. He was the first African American to publish in the Journal of Southern History, contributing a book review in 1940. Not until 1955 did the journal accept an article published by a Black scholar (Elsie Lewis).

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination, by Vincent W. Lloyd

Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry, and African America in Lewis Nkosi’s Drama

ABSTRACT: Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi’s writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi’s creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960–61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama “We Can’t All Be Martin Luther King,” broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone—unacknowledged—from activist-writer Julian Bond’s ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle—in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad—with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism.

The Fate of African Americans Rests with the Ottomans: The Armenian Crisis, Lynching, and the “American Question,” 1880–1920

Between 1880 and 1920, African Americans and Armenians became people on the run, the targets of racial persecution by state-sanctioned merchants of terror. Black intellectual-activists saw in the massacre of Armenians powerful parallels with the escalation of lynching and other forms of domestic terrorism in the United States. This article examines how African Americans galvanized to the defense of embattled Armenians, warning that the “Armenian crisis” served as a clarion call that should dissuade White Americans from embracing lynching with greater zeal. Black intellectuals accused that so long as Americans lynched their own citizens with impunity, the United States stood no chance of being a moral beacon in foreign affairs. More, they insisted that Americans’ commitment to lynching placed the United States on the same trajectory as despotic states likes Germany, Imperial Russia, and Ottoman Turkey. Thus, in marshaling to save Armenians, African Americans rallied to save themselves.

Racial democracy crisis and the emergence of critical race and feminist theories in Brazilian criminology

This article aims to understand the emergence of the academic field of critical studies on racism, and its intersectionality with gender and class in the last three decades, in Brazilian criminology. It identifies the core elements of a specific grammar on epistemological perspectives, academic agendas, and political solutions. At the same time, it points to the participation of new subjects, subjectivities, and relations of academic production and dissemination. It also explores the impact of the post-Durban Conference Era (2001) – the crisis of the ideology of racial democracy – on scientific production on inequality and the negative effects of the criminal justice system. It proposes an explanation for the changes in academic production stemming from the transformations of Brazilian public universities. We claim the importance of this epistemological and methodological renewal to address the inequalities of the criminal justice system: the incorporation of new concepts and perspectives such as genocide, whiteness, epistemicide, intersectionality, and necropolitics; the emphasis on the production of Black intellectuals, historically ignored by the academy, who thematised dimensions of racial violence from their experience and political struggle; the emergence of new research networks throughout Brazil and new profiles of researchers, an effect of racial diversity resulting from affirmative action in higher education; more dialogue between academic research and the demands of social movements; new social movements that actively used the media to confront police and prison violence.

The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg

With an introduction and a collection of fifteen chapters, Fischer and Grinberg have provided one of the most insightful and wide-ranging analyses of slavery, abolition, and its legacies in Brazil published to date. The editors’ introduction highlights three individuals who re-surface throughout the volume. Son of a wealthy landowner in the province (now state) of Pernambuco, Joaquim Nabuco (1813–1878) founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society in September 1880. That Society and Nabuco’s book Abolitionism (1883) helped to foment a movement that brought Brazilian slavery to an end in 1888. Nabuco denounced slavery’s impact on all sectors of Brazilian society, highlighting how it corrupted the rule of law and harmed economic development.From the same state of Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) became one of Brazil’s most famous intellectuals of the twentieth century. Freyre’s depiction of beneficent slave owners and “racial democracy” in post-emancipation Brazil have been thoroughly debunked. Nevertheless, his descriptions of patriarchalism, family structure, sexuality, and race mixture remain hugely relevant.The third intellectual is Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011), an African Brazilian from São Paulo. As activist, journalist, playwright, and professor, Nascimento relentlessly affirmed the contributions of Africans and their descendants to Brazilian society. By emphasizing Black resistance to enslavement and detailing the pervasive racism directed toward Blackness since the founding of the nation, Nascimento fueled controversial debates. Many of his initiatives became government policy, such as the revision of educational curricula to include diverse histories and affirmative action in employment. Nabuco’s critiques of institutions and economics, Freyre’s expansive social histories, and Nascimento’s studies of culture inspired research that is readily witnessed in The Boundaries of Freedom. Extended stays and experiences outside Brazil influenced all three of these men; several of the chapters address the theme of transnationalism.In a section entitled “On the Ethic of Silence,” Hebe Mattos comments on the book’s interdisciplinarity: “The theoretical references for this work [the collection of chapters] from E. P. Thompson’s cultural Marxism to the micro-historical methodologies of Fredrik Barth, emphasize the relational and political meanings of collective identity formation, as well as the relationship between normative structures and social agency” (317). Tying macro-histories (such as paternalism, plantation economies, class relations, and expanding capitalism) with micro-histories (such as slave flight, court appeals, day-by-day violence, labor conditions, and residential patterns), contributors shed light on silent histories and “precarious freedoms” during and after slavery. Quantitative methods provide evidence of the transport of enslaved children to the province of Pernambuco. Local legislation banned the purchase of goods produced by slaves and prevented access to taverns. “Subterranean structures” ensured the marginalization of female slaves and free Black women after emancipation. Free Black intellectuals, such as Teodoro Sampaio and André Rebouças, employed personal and professional skills to negotiate their way in hostile environments. Complex themes related to social agency and Black resistance emerge through contributors’ meticulous readings of original written documents and newspapers, as well as a close viewing of posters, paintings, and photographs located in archives large and small inside and outside Brazil.In a chapter describing relations between Brazil and Uruguay, Grinberg shows how tensions mounted pursuant to Uruguay’s emancipation decree of 1842. Slaves who crossed the border into Uruguay gained their freedom; they could not be re-enslaved if they returned to Brazil because of an 1831 Brazilian law that banned the importation of slaves to Brazil. Planters in the southernmost province of Rio Grande do Sul condemned their own government for failing to prevent slave flight and protect their property (ownership of slaves). Instead of following traditional approaches to the study of diplomacy, Grinberg points to the need to “forge a social history of international relations” (131). Such a plea, alongside the path-breaking insights shared in this volume, could not be more relevant.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections