Description
This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history.
The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.
Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses-and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.
About the Author
Brandon R. Byrd is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti.
Leslie M. Alexander is an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861; and Fear of a Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Birth of Black internationalism. She is also coeditor of We Shall Independent Be: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States and the Encyclopedia of African American History. Alexander is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship.
Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and the author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination.
Reviews
"The contributors to Ideas in Unexpected Place: Reimagining Black Intellectual History offer insightful and innovative explorations into the possibilities of the undertheorized field of Black intellectual history in the United States and the vast African diaspora from the early nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Challenging conventional notions of what it means to be an intellectual, the thought-provoking essays in this volume will undoubtedly influence future debates and cross-generational dialogues about how diverse groups of Black thinkers and activists made sense of their worlds." -Pero G. Dagbovie, author of African American History Reconsidered
"Ideas in Unexpected Places is a timely, cohesive, and critical volume that seeks to push, and even trouble, how historians of African American intellectual history, and historians of intellectual history more broadly, define, investigate, and document Black intellectual history. Challenging historians to reconsider the production of Black intellectual thought and activity, the methodologies historians deploy to explore these subjects, and the primary sources that form the bases of their analyses, the collection succeeds in making a well-organized and crucial contribution to current debates about the limits and violence of the archive, the privileging of certain voices and perspectives over others in historical argumentation, the contours of Black agency, the ideological and geographical origins of Black Power, the intellectual production of Black women, Black international solidarities, and documenting and disseminating Black histories in a digital age." -D'Weston Haywood, author of Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement
"Ideas in Unexpected Places powerfully captures the remarkable impact of the African American Intellectual History Society in shaping-and significantly expanding-the field of Black intellectual history. The volume brings together an array of talented scholars who offer brilliant insights that will forever change how we write about Black thought, history, and culture." -Keisha N. Blain, author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
"This is a broadly conceived project that is expansive and forward-looking while attendant to a tradition of scholarship and epistemology emanating from the African diaspora. Familiar subjects of history are given new light, new treatment . . . a welcome contribution to the field of intellectual history." -Christopher M. Tinson, author of Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s
Book Information
ISBN 9780810144736
Author Brandon R. Byrd
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 435g
The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.
Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses-and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.
About the Author
Brandon R. Byrd is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti.
Leslie M. Alexander is an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861; and Fear of a Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Birth of Black internationalism. She is also coeditor of We Shall Independent Be: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States and the Encyclopedia of African American History. Alexander is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship.
Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and the author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination.
Reviews
"The contributors to Ideas in Unexpected Place: Reimagining Black Intellectual History offer insightful and innovative explorations into the possibilities of the undertheorized field of Black intellectual history in the United States and the vast African diaspora from the early nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Challenging conventional notions of what it means to be an intellectual, the thought-provoking essays in this volume will undoubtedly influence future debates and cross-generational dialogues about how diverse groups of Black thinkers and activists made sense of their worlds." -Pero G. Dagbovie, author of African American History Reconsidered
"Ideas in Unexpected Places is a timely, cohesive, and critical volume that seeks to push, and even trouble, how historians of African American intellectual history, and historians of intellectual history more broadly, define, investigate, and document Black intellectual history. Challenging historians to reconsider the production of Black intellectual thought and activity, the methodologies historians deploy to explore these subjects, and the primary sources that form the bases of their analyses, the collection succeeds in making a well-organized and crucial contribution to current debates about the limits and violence of the archive, the privileging of certain voices and perspectives over others in historical argumentation, the contours of Black agency, the ideological and geographical origins of Black Power, the intellectual production of Black women, Black international solidarities, and documenting and disseminating Black histories in a digital age." -D'Weston Haywood, author of Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement
"Ideas in Unexpected Places powerfully captures the remarkable impact of the African American Intellectual History Society in shaping-and significantly expanding-the field of Black intellectual history. The volume brings together an array of talented scholars who offer brilliant insights that will forever change how we write about Black thought, history, and culture." -Keisha N. Blain, author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
"This is a broadly conceived project that is expansive and forward-looking while attendant to a tradition of scholarship and epistemology emanating from the African diaspora. Familiar subjects of history are given new light, new treatment . . . a welcome contribution to the field of intellectual history." -Christopher M. Tinson, author of Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s
Book Information
ISBN 9780810144736
Author Brandon R. Byrd
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 435g
