White Intellectuals Research Articles

Blacks in the Middle Ages – What About Race and Racism in the Past? Literary and Art-Historical Reflections

Undoubtedly, racism is a deeply-anchored problem that continues to vex our world. There is a long history behind it, which can easily be traced back to the Middle Ages and beyond. This article, however, takes into consideration a number of medieval narratives and art works in which surprisingly positive images of Blacks are provided. The encounter with black-skinned people tended to create problems even for the best-intended white intellectuals or poets during the pre-modern era, but the examples studied here reveal that long before the modern age there was already an alternative discourse to embrace at least individual Blacks as equals within the courtly and the religious context. Since Europe did not yet know the large-scale form of slavery, as it emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were much less contacts between Blacks and Whites. Nevertheless, the evidence brought to the table here clearly signals that we would commit a serious mistake by equating modern-day racism with the situation in the Middle Ages, as much as modern research (Heng) has argued along those lines. It would be more appropriate to talk about the encounter of races within the literary and art-historical context. Even the notion of Black diaspora would not fully address the issue because the evidence brought to the table here engages mostly with black or half-black knights and other individuals who enjoy considerable respect and appear to be integral members of courtly society both in the East and in the West. Instead of working with theoretical models developed for the analysis of racism in our own times, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study offers close readings of literary examples of personal encounters between members of different races in medieval German and Dutch literature, and of the representation of Blacks in late medieval and early modern art history, concluding with some comments on the first Black philosopher in eighteenth-century Germany.

One by One, the Stars

One by One, the Stars

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.

Other sides of new moon: a historical reading of election of Rui de Noronha as first mozambican poet

This article seeks to read from a historical perspective the election of Rui de Noronha as the first Mozambican poet, understanding this as process. Therefore, the article makes a diachronic reception study investigating two groups of texts: 1) the production of critical reviews of Noronha’s work by white intellectuals, which gravitates around the posthumous organization of a collection of his sonnets in 1943; 2) texts which reveals the position and reception of Rui de Noronha in the black and mestizo literary environment in Lourenço Marques in the early years of the 20th century. This elective process is especially relevant to understand the debates involved in the birth of an autonomous literature in moments of cultural assimilation, racism, and intense ethnocentrism in the colony.

Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture by John Levi Barnard

Reviewed by: Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture by John Levi Barnard Shelley P. Haley John Levi Barnard. Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 233. $78.00. ISBN 978-0-19-066359-9. “Black Classicism” began in Classics with the important work of discovery and recovery of Black classicists and their triumphs in the discipline, particularly in the United States. However, as the subfield of Black Classicism moves beyond that first phase and expands beyond geographical and genré borders, the depths of the political analysis engendered by African-descended intellectuals are breathtaking to behold. Barnard’s Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture offers something for everyone. From the literary analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to a deconstruction of the National September 11 Memorial Museum and Kara Walker’s art installation A Subtlety, Barnard offers a thought-provoking [End Page 493] critique of the differing applications of ancient history between Black and white intellectuals from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Barnard’s discussion (69–88) of how Black intellectuals like William Wells Brown, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet used the neoclassical style of the US Capitol Building to delineate the United States’ decay stemming from slavery is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the connection between history and monumental architecture. On nearly every page, Barnard presents examples of the critique of the US’s monumental culture as that of an imperial slave society. The implicit and sometimes explicit conclusion of every critique is that the ancient imperial slave cultures rotted away and the same will happen to the US. In his play, The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom, in which he names the main character “Cato,” Brown also provides a stirring antidote to Joseph Addison’s Cato. As Barnard states (64), “That Brown chose Cato for the name of a character he modeled to some extent on himself is also revealing of the ways black classicism critiques both American slavery and the ways classical tradition functions to enable and even to celebrate it. The naming of enslaved people after classical figures was common . . . But the name Cato had a particularly galling significance, since it was the name whites associated most strongly with the concept of freedom.” Barnard’s discussion of Charles Chesnutt’s critique of the Lincoln Memorial through the use of “conjure tales” is riveting. Every classicist should read Chesnutt’s “A Roman Antique.” I especially appreciated Barnard’s framing of Phillis Wheatley as a political actor at the pivotal juncture of US intellectual history when Classics is supplanting Biblical Studies as the intellectual authority. As Barnard states (25), “. . . knowledge of the classics was certainly a form of intellectual and political currency in Wheatley’s world.” Chapters 3 (“Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory”) and 4 (“Crumbling into Dust: Conjure and the Ruins of Empire”) might be uncomfortable reading for some, especially those who want Black Classicism to remain a narrative of the exceptionalism of some Black intellectuals because of their classical education, rather than a scathing critique of white supremacy. Criticisms are few and far between but I would be remiss in describing the work as flawless. Several sentences are great examples of Ciceronian periods but are, generally, inaccessible to the average modern reader. The best example is the final sentence of the book: “If the unfortunate excerpt from Virgil’s epic of empire demonstrates the ongoing validity of Ralph Ellison’s perception that classical history and literature provide the sacred texts of Western cultural rituals of power—what he called the ‘myth and ritual business’ lying ‘beneath the foundations of the West’—then Kara Walker’s monument across the river attests to the ongoing relevance of a critical countertradition that aims to undermine the social and political power they have been made to serve” (151). Furthermore, Barnard perpetuates a debunked theory about the construction of the Egyptian monuments (132): “Neither of these perspectives ignores the fact that ancient Egypt was itself a slave society, the monuments of which were constructed by the coerced labor of the oppressed . . .” The general consensus...

The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon

Reviewed by: The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages by Matthew X. Vernon Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Matthew X. Vernon. The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. xiii, 266. $89.00 cloth; $69.99 e-book. Those of us who take a critical stance toward medieval studies as a field and the ways that it perpetuates white supremacy and expels people of color from its ranks are often asked, especially by scholars from other areas, why we are trying to save medieval studies. Why not move on to other fields of study that are more inclusive? Although the answers vary among medievalists, my answer has always been that medieval literature and culture do not belong to white academia, nor do they belong to white supremacists. Perhaps this is why I found Matthew X. Vernon's The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages to be one of the most important books on medievalism and the Middle Ages to date. Vernon's insightful archival work, the strength of his arguments, and the nuance he brings to discussions of the Middle Ages are but a few of the reasons his book is a must-read in medieval studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalisms, and African-American studies. Vernon carefully integrates materials from both African-American and medieval studies, demonstrating that nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-Americans used the Middle Ages to reject their erasure from America's founding origin myths, in which the nation was often [End Page 427] presented as Anglo-Saxon in history and identity. The Black Middle Ages is divided into six chapters, and many of these chapters begin by deconstructing the ways that white writers and academics use the Middle Ages to equate the concept of the nation with a concept of whiteness. The chapters' substantive analysis, however, centers on the African-American writers and academics who create counter-narratives to this imagined white nationhood (shaped from a constructed white mythical past) by including African-Americans in national narratives of progress. It is difficult to do justice to the richness of the materials that Vernon brings to each chapter, and the plethora of African-American voices that he brings into the conversation. I can only say that if you can stop reading this review and simply read his The Black Middle Ages, then you should do so right now. The opening introductory chapter, "Reading out of Time— Genealogy, African-American Literature, and the Middle Ages," outlines the ways that political and literary figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including Thomas Jefferson, John H. Van Eyrie, and Walt Whitman—drew on and helped create a fantasy of the English Middle Ages as racially pure (and white). These white intellectuals imagined the Middle Ages as a framework through which to construct a narrative of national progress, a narrative that simultaneously erased the voices of those who threatened its logic. At every turn, however, African-Americans challenged these medieval myths by exposing them as false, creating a counter-narrative of the Middle Ages that laid bare the fantasy of whiteness in arguments about citizenship and American belonging (18). W. E. B. Du Bois offers a case in point, with his Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) clearly demonstrating how the United States and Europe used the Middle Ages to create ideologies that justified colonization and imagined a community of whiteness extending far back into the past (20). Chapter 2, "Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula," shows how African-American intellectuals used the Middle Ages to renegotiate terms of belonging by rejecting the notion of the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of racial purity, instead describing a multicultural medieval England that supported the possibility of racial mixing as a means to reach political power. Vernon shows that African-American and abolitionist writers such as Frederick Douglass; Lydia Maria Child, author of the short story "The Black Saxons" (The Liberator, 1841); and William Day, who wrote the poem "The [End Page 428] Black Saxons: A Tale of America" (1850), had a...

“A room of experience into which I cannot enter”: John Steinbeck on Race

Abstract In her seminal study on intellectuals and the civil rights struggle, Carol Polsgrove castigated “white intellectuals, in the North and South” for their reticence. After Brown v. Board of Education “opened the door to change,” she argues, America's leading intellectuals simply “milled about outside the door, debating amongst themselves how fast America ought to go through it.” Yet what of John Steinbeck? How did the compassionate advocate of social justice in the thirties respond to the racial upheaval of the fifties and sixties, a time when his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature made him once more a highly visible public intellectual? This paper applies a historical perspective in examining Steinbeck's contributions (or lack thereof) to America's race issue, with a particular emphasis on his nonfiction and personal correspondence. It is argued that Steinbeck was typically uncomfortable airing his support for the civil rights movement and deliberately avoided presenting himself as a spokesman on the issue. While in his fiction he tended to indulge in stereotyping, he did so with no perceptible intent to denigrate his nonwhite characters. His preoccupation, even when addressing the race issue directly, was always with the danger of moral decline in American society at large. Steinbeck's African American was presented as a dignified and courageous foil to the materialistic white American, who was “trapped and entangled” in avaricious individualism.

“Half Bacchanalian, Half Devout”: White Intellectuals, Black Folk Culture, and the “Negro Problem”

In the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration.

Biblijna argumentacja w dyskusji o separacji rasowej i niewolnictwie czarnych w USA w drugiej połowie XIX wieku

A discussion on a Racial Segregation and a Slavery in the United States of America in a Second Half of the 19th Century – Arguments Derived from the Bible (Summary) In the 19th century White intellectuals were looking for justification of such a social organisation which sanctioned racial segregation. These concepts were fueled not only by the ideology of Social Darwinism and scientific racism, ideas of Gobineu, Chamberlain and Lapouge, but also by the proof of diversity of races recorded in the Bible. Numerous experts attempted to find a cause of slavery in the Bible. They claimed that Blacks are not the posterity of Adam and Eve, but they are either the offspring of humans and apes, or descendants of the first murderer, Cain, or even descendants of Ham, Noah’s cursed son. In the perception of the experts, the sinful origins of Blacks legitimized slavery and segregation. The radicals repeatedly refused to admit that Blacks are human beings, and even used to call them beasts and apes. This strongly biased interpretation of Biblical texts was one of the roots of American racism and racial segregation.

Poetic Negrism and the National Sentiment of Anti-West Indianism and Anti-Imperialism in Panamanian Literature

Poetic Negrism and the National Sentiment of Anti-West Indianism and Anti-Imperialism in Panamanian Literature Sonja Stephenson Watson (bio) While Panamanian negrista literature during the early-twentieth century protested North American imperialism and hegemony, another result of the presence of the United States in Panamá was a decided increase in anti-West Indian hatred that had its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1855, approximately 45,000 Jamaicans migrated to Panamá to construct the Trans-Isthmian Railroad. The attempted construction of the French Canal from 1880–1889 would bring 84,000 additional Jamaicans to Panamá. After France’s failure, the United States intervened in 1903 and imported as many as 19,900 West Indian workers from Barbados as well as a small number of workers from Martinique, Guadalupe, and Trinidad to complete the Panamá Canal (1904–1914). Thus, the thousands of English-speaking West Indian immigrants who migrated to Panamá during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to help build the nation were now viewed as a threat to the nation-building project because of their blackness and unwillingness to assimilate. This essay argues that the discrimination against West Indians and the stereotypical portrayals of blacks during the negrista period (1920–1960)1 in Panamá was racially motivated and enhanced by a national hatred of United States imperialism. The negrista movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s in the Hispanic Caribbean and was a pseudo-black poetry that focused on the black body, the supposed sexual prowess of people of African descent, and black people’s love of music and propensity for rhythm (Cartey 67). Negrista poets such as Luis Palés Matos (1898–1957), Emilio Ballagas (1910–1954), and Manuel del Cabral (1907–1999) portrayed African-derived cultures through appropriated poetic devices such as onomatopoeia, repetition, rhythm, and rhyme. Although this poetry focused on images of black life, it was primarily a movement of white intellectuals who objectified and portrayed them in stereotypical fashion. As a result, the movement has often been viewed as the “exploitation of black culture by white writers” (Cartey 41). These poets portrayed blacks and African-derived culture as wholly sensual, exotic, and sexual without any psychological or cultural depth. The black literary image that materialized during this period was often superficial, and rarely focused on the socio-historical and socioeconomic factors that plagued black America such as poverty, discrimination, and racism that burdened dark-skinned West Indians. In reading the literature of Panamanian writers Víctor Franceschi and Demetrio Korsi, which coincided with the aftermath of the construction of the Panamá Canal (post-1914), it is evident that their negrista poems served a purpose other than portraying Afro-Panamanian culture. Decades after the completion of the canal, which resided between the heavily black populated [End Page 459] cities of Panamá and Colón, Panamanians resented the “looming” United States presence in the canal zone. Negrista poetry responded to North American imperialism by vigorously denouncing United States presence and policy in the region and railing against Afro-Caribbean immigrants who comprised a majority of the canal zone workers.2 Although negrista writers argued that there were cultural and linguistic differences between Afro-Hispanics, blacks who were enslaved in Panamá, and Afro-Caribbeans, the literature makes clear that the hatred was inspired by racist assumptions about dark-skinned West Indians. Similar to other negrista writers, Franceschi and Korsi objectified blacks in their works and portrayed them uniformly with little regard for cultural or historical differences. However, the writers’ poems and essays confirm a particular racial prejudice towards West Indians. Many Panamanian critics acknowledge the anti-imperialistic tone of the works of this period, but none link anti-imperialism with anti-West Indianism.3 My analysis of the negrista movement in Panamá challenges other interpretations that primarily focus on the folkloric aspects of these poems by examining the role that racism played in the negrista writings of Franceschi and Korsi during the apex of the anti-imperialism crusade of the early-twentieth century. Moreover, the West Indian presence coupled with the anti-imperialism agenda contested the mestizaje (“race-mixing”) ideology that characterized Panamá during the nineteenth century. In turn, Panamanian nationalists conflated black...

(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry

(Ex)Isles in the Harlem Renaissance: The Insular and Archipelagic Topographies of Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry Brian Russell Roberts (bio) A Generation of Columbuses and the Islands of the Sea African american writer Wallace Thurman has been known as the "enfant terrible" of the Harlem Renaissance. After the Salt Lake City native arrived in Harlem in 1925, he quickly assumed the role of bombastic spokesperson for the Renaissance's younger artists. By November of 1926, he had edited the first and only issue of the magazine Fire!!, a publication that (as Langston Hughes remembered) sought to "burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas" of such influential race magazines as the Crisis, Opportunity, and the Messenger (Big Sea 235-36). Further shoring up Thurman's image as the Renaissance's young artist agonistes, he loudly rejected W. E. B. Du Bois's call to use black expressive culture as propaganda and publicly criticized Alain Locke's landmark anthology, The New Negro (1925), as a collection revealing "the Negro literary renaissance" as merely "a new source of revenue" for white publishers and a "fad" for "white intellectuals" ("High Low" 219; Henderson 295). Indicative of his sense of radical departure from the aesthetic and propagandistic programs of the Renaissance's old guard, Thurman in 1928 claimed that the voices of "articulate negroes [sic] of the past" were "so busy justifying their presence [within an] inimical environment that [End Page 91] they ceased to be human beings." In opposition to such ostensibly retrograde figures, Thurman wrote that he saw himself as part of a generation of "Columbuses . . . discovering things about themselves and about their environment which it seems to them their elders have been at pains to hide" (qtd. in van Notten 141-42). When read within the context of modern African American literature, Thurman's willingness to consign previous African American writers to the dustbin of history is far from exceptional. A generation earlier, Du Bois had made a similar move in wresting the mantel of race leadership from Booker T. Washington (Souls 33-44). And less than ten years after Thurman claimed previous black voices had conciliated to the point that they "ceased to be human," Richard Wright dismissed the black writers who preceded him as having devolved into "French poodles who do clever tricks" for white Americans ("Blueprint" 53). In many ways Thurman fits neatly into an oedipal procession of black male US writers and cultural figures of the twentieth century. Yet I would argue that Thurman's situation within this procession is also exceptional—in no small part because of the metaphor through which he conceived of his oppositional relationship with older and better established writers. Thurman narrated himself as one of a generation of "Columbuses" in search of terrae incognitae. Within the economy of his Columbian narrative, he and his generation were voyagers seeking unexplored islands (psychological, racial, and aesthetic) that long had been hidden within a forbidding sea of cultural mores and prescriptive statements on the nature of valid African American racial artistry and propaganda. We have access to one of Thurman's most significant voyages of discovery in his novel The Blacker the Berry, which since its 1929 publication has been famous for sailing past the well-colonized project of critiquing the US's interracial prejudice and landing instead upon what had remained the unsettled (and unsettling) terrain of color prejudice within the African American community. Remarking upon the novelty of this focus has been a commonplace in discussions of The Blacker the Berry. 1 What has gone unremarked, however, is that in setting out as a Columbus to discover the hidden islands of color prejudice within black US society and communities, Thurman fittingly wrote a novel that draws upon and seeks to reconstellate a distinctly insular (i.e., island-based) topography. Though its immediate geography is confined to the continental United States, The Blacker the Berry's geospatial awareness [End Page 92] extends from the Philippines in the East to the Caribbean in the West, all the while testing the linkages between these island chains and the archipelago of black individuals and communities scattered throughout the big sea...

Barack Obama, the 2008 Presidential Election, and the New Cosmopolitanism: Figuring the Black Body

On July 24, 2008, a new American presidential candidate--one whose personal background has been attacked by some as rather than sufficiently American (or even adequately black American)--declared in Berlin, speak ... as a fellow citizen of the (Obama, Berlin). In order to recall President John F. Kennedy's 1963 trip to West Berlin and to signify on Kennedy's declaration Ich bin ein Berliner, Barack Obama used a phrase commonly attributed to ancient philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope. At the same time, his words resonated with a well-known 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., who announced at New York's Riverside Church, speak as a citizen of the (Beyond 153). Obama's reiteration of ancient credo comes at a time when some, such as Ulrich Beck, have asserted, reality itself has become (287). On a structural scale, people live in a world of escalating international circulation, including the circulation of ideas, products, people, and capital. To quote Obama, ours is an era of globalization and dizzying technological change (Audacity 10). In addition to new information and transportation technologies, new transnational labor and immigration patterns have altered the conditions of life in the United States and around the world. Recent events have forcefully demonstrated that the economies of individual nations are increasingly linked to those of others. As presidential candidate Obama's claim to world citizenship in Berlin and his complicated personal history and ancestry suggest, the 44th president of the United States seems uniquely positioned to represent in iconic fashion this new state of affairs. Obama's physical embodiment of what might be called cosmopolitan blackness also contributes to a current debate over the promises and dangers of a revitalized social ethic. Since the mid 1990s (a time period that overlaps with the publication of Obama's 1995 Dreams from My Father), a number of black and white intellectuals, cultural critics, literary scholars, sociologists, and philosophers have demonstrated interest in revising older theories of ethical cosmopolitanism, or the recognition of shared human rights, in ways that will make it more responsive to local bonds and affiliations. Current theorists of cosmopolitanism have been especially interested in exploring its complex relationships to nationalism, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity through the consideration of so-called vernacular, already existing, and discrepant cosmopolitanism. (1) The current attempt to recuperate a ethic after the postmodemist rejection of universals and after the post-Civil Rights concentration on identity politics has centered on the question of whether a revitalized appeal to universal human rights can provide a basis for progressive social reform, or whether it simply promotes abstract loyalties at the expense of existing ethnic, geographical, and national communities. What does examination of the social meanings attributed to the raced body of the American president, who has recently been called one of the most photographed men in the world today (Newly), contribute to these debates? What does it mean when Obama positions himself as embodiment of democratic and values in his speeches and his writing? What notion of citizenship--of personal, national, and international identities--might such claims entail? To answer these questions, I first examine several social meanings that were attributed to Obama's body by the American public during the 2008 campaign, especially as they were represented in widely circulated photographs and images. An examination of the political representations of Obama reveals the degree to which the candidate's body became a contested site for competing conceptions of citizenship, ethnicity, and nation. Second, I analyze Obama's own reading of his body as incarnation of values, drawing largely upon his speeches. …

Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Cultures de l’Afrique Noire et de l’Occident (1960): Eurafricanism, Negritude and the Civilisation of the Universal

This essay considers the impact of the Cultures de l’Afrique noire et de l’occident: première table ronde (1960) on Senghor’s thinking regarding Euro‐African cultural relations between the late 1940s and the 1960s. As the first formal encounter between black African and white European intellectuals, the Roundtable sought to define the idea of the civilisation of the universal as a common cultural basis upon which to build a shared, globally relevant culture. The Roundtable’s advocacy of the creation of a new universal culture appealed to Senghor, who had already embraced the concept of Eurafricanité – Euro‐African hybridity – on economic and political levels. Yet the discussions in Rome and their aftermath encouraged Senghor, by then a leading statesman, to take a more rigorously Africanist approach to cultural relations between the two continents, and gave him a new perspective from which to contest contemporary African culture’s place within world culture.

A White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius

This essay places the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of the historian and sociologist George Rawick as a leading student not only of race but also of class in the context of his coming into contact with African American social movements and with transnational black intellectuals. Working especially through C. L. R. James and the Facing Reality revolutionary tendency in Detroit and in London, Rawick abandoned the orthodox and vanguardist Marxism of his youth for a far more open-ended political and intellectual praxis characterized by a commitment to listening to the voices of slaves and rank-and-file workers historically and to participants in freedom movements in the 1960s. The results, far from producing organizational victories for Facing Reality, transformed Rawick as a thinker and bespoke a neglected theme of Black Power acting to transform and energize, rather than to marginalize, white intellectuals.

Prisoner of Love: Affiliation, Sexuality, and the Black Panther Party

We should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms faggot and punk should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for to men who are enemies of the people, such as Richard Nixon and John Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people. --Huey P. Newton (1970) behaved like a prisoner of love. --Jean Genet (1981) French writer Jean Genet revealed in a 1975 interview with German writer Hubert Fichte, I could only feel at home among people oppressed by color or factions in revolt against whites. Maybe I'm a black who's white or pink, but still black. Apparently, Genet was echoing the views of a generation of elite white intellectuals and artists who articulated a revolutionary subjectivity by identifying with the liberation struggles of oppressed people of African descent around the world. (1) Actors, artists, and intellectuals such as Jean Seberg, Marlon Brando. Bert Schneider, Jean Genet, Leonard Bernstein, Agnes Varda, Jean Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, and political radicals such as Ulrike Meinhof of Germany's Red Army Faction, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground all proclaimed an affinity for and affiliation with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and saw the Panthers as providing important models not only for political and social change, but for profound personal transformations. The Black Panthers became masters at creating a radical visual and discursive language of affiliation and identification that expressed the need for personal involvement in liberatory social and political change. In September 1970 BPP Chairman Huey P. Newton declared at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in society. They might be the most oppressed people in society ... maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary. (2) Newton was attesting to the complexities that the Panther model of identification articulated as both a theory and praxis of revolutionary self-making. It is impossible to attribute the widespread appeal of the Black Panther Party to non-African Americans, women, and sexual minorities to the caricatures found in many contemporary accounts that embody a simple phallocentric masculinity and a repository of reductionist racial politics. This essay examines the ways the models of identification offered by the Black Panther Party created and provoked a radical affiliation among people as far removed from the African American struggle as the openly gay literary artist Jean Genet and Hollywood actress Jean Seberg. It asserts that the Black Panther Party's discourse of affiliation and identification created a space within radical political discourse for gender and sexual outsiders to rearticulate themselves discursively as empowered by their outsider status and association with revolutionaries. The Black Panther Party differed from other contemporaneous radical political formations of the Black Power era because the leadership was able to promote the empowerment of African Americans while articulating a vision of radical political possibility and change that included the refiguring of identity across a broad spectrum of political, gender, and sexual categories. Black Panther iconography relied on the models of affiliation and identification reflected in the vanguard model of political activism proposed by Ernesto Guevara in Guerilla Warfare and later cogently rearticulated by Regis Debray in Revolution within the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. (3) In Guerilla Warfare Che Guevara used the example of the Cuban Revolution to demonstrate the ways in which a small group of revolutionaries could successfully foment revolution in the face of the challenges posed in facing off against a large state-sponsored, professionally trained army. …

The Obligation Thesis: Understanding the Persistent “Black Voice” in Modern Legal Scholarship

This Article revisits the debate over minority voice scholarship, particularly African-American scholarship, that raged in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the advent of critical race theory (CRT). Many critical race theorists elevated the voices of minority scholars, arguing that scholarship in the minority voice should be accorded greater legitimacy than work on race produced by white intellectuals. Many white and some African-American scholars disagreed with “Crits’” analyses. They charged that good scholarship by African Americans should be judged as a fact-in itself, not ghettoized or subjected to less rigorous analysis than scholarship by white academics. This Article explores the work of four current up-and-coming black legal scholars to revisit that early disagreement and its ramifications in the modern black legal academy. By and large, it appears that the anti-CRT writers have won the debate. Today’s legal academy, at least as reflected in the work of many highly sought-after black scholars, more closely reflects the anti-narrative perspective on scholarship. Black scholars continue to write on racial topics, but with different methodologies than many CRT scholars. Like other areas of legal scholarship, interdisciplinary and doctrinal methods are most prevalent. The Article suggests that one reason African-American legal scholars continue to write about race, despite the risks of doing so, is their sense of obligation to the black community. I contend that this obligation runs just as deeply for black academics as it does for black practitioners, who tend to closely relate the legal profession with the struggle for racial justice.

Rebels with Causes: White Officials in Black Trade Unions in South Africa, 1973–94

This article argues that white officials in black trade unions in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s were rebels with numerous causes. These causes were to help build a democratic and powerful black trade union movement, to work towards social and economic justice, and to secure their own long-term future in South Africa. The argument is based on presenting a historical overview of the two major black trade union federations that emerged in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. One was non-racial and accepted white intellectuals as officials. It eventually grew into COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which played a major role in the mass democratic movement during the transition to democracy in 1994. The other black trade union federation was Africanist with some black consciousness orientations and appointed only blacks as officials. It eventually grew into NACTU, the National Council of Trade Unions. It never matched COSATU in size, strength or strategic leadership. The non-racial federation grew much stronger than the Africanist federation by focusing on building active democratic shop steward structures in the workplace. This was part of a deliberate strategy by white intellectuals in the unions to put control of the unions into the hands of black workers, who gradually rose through the ranks into positions of leadership. They and other black intellectuals replaced the white intellectuals in the unions who could then proceed to serve their country in other ways. One of them, Alec Erwin, is presently a minister in President Mbeki's cabinet. Far from having been rebels without a cause, white intellectuals in black unions had the privilege of working towards political reconciliation as well as the search for social and economic justice in South Africa.

Similarities and Differences between Rebels with and without a Cause

Both our articles accept the construct that white officials in black unions were in a contradictory location. In an earlier article I wrote reflecting on the role of white intellectuals in black unions (Maree, 1989a) I also employed Eric Olin Wright’s ‘contradictory locations within class relations’ as a way of understanding the role of white intellectuals. Buhlungu innovatively extends the concept to include class and race relations, which strengthens its analytic power in the South African context. Buhlungu and I agree that white officials played a positive role in the black unions that emerged in the 1970s. Although Buhlungu fairly frequently mentions negative attributes of some white officials, he concludes that, ‘In short, the legacy of white officials in the black union movement was generally a positive one’. He attributes their positive role to the intellectual, strategic and administrative skills they brought to the unions as well as their access to financial resources. I attribute the positive role of white officials to the important role they played in helping to create democratic structures and practices in the black unions as well as helping to build the unions into powerful organizations. We both accept that white officials’ role in the black unions diminished during the 1980s, but for different reasons: Buhlungu attributes it to an increase in the number of young black assertive organic intellectuals who challenged white officials who then ‘retreated’ from the unions. I maintain that it was the objective of most white intellectuals right from the outset to train and develop black workers to take over the running of the unions. Rather than retreat from the unions, white officials could leave the unions