This essay explores the archive of a 1971 interview of Angela Davis by Swedish journalist Bo Holmström—recorded in Santa Clara County Jail where Davis awaited trial—to examine the relationship ...between Black radical thought and its social and intellectual mediation, especially when it comes to questions of violence versus nonviolence. Where Holmström invokes the “violence/nonviolence” binary in the interview, Davis pointedly resists its distortions, restoring the record of contemporary and historical conditions of racial terror that both necessitate and criminalize Black self-defense. Decades later, the interview was filtered through the violence/nonviolence binary in editing for the acclaimed 2011 documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, with Davis’s wider conversation with Holmström not only abridged but remixed into a shorter exchange on armed self-defense. Studying the interview from its conditions of possibility through its later remixing, and reading it together with her opening defense statement (1972) and later speeches and writings, the essay excavates and explicates Davis’s original theoretical interventions and indexes a cluster of forces that mediate Black radical thought, Black women’s radical thought more specifically, and prison texts. The final section historicizes Davis’s theorization of the spatial and relational contexts of Black self-defense in Dynamite Hill, Alabama, and in California, and contends that her incisive interventions into the violence/nonviolence binary in 1971 remain critical here and now.
This article explores the transformation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ viewpoint on Israel between the early and mid-20th century. It highlights historical and political forces that compelled him to support the ...Zionist project, especially Black Orientalism, and the connections between Black Nationalism and Zionism, connections between Black and Jewish diasporic experiences. Finally, the article reveals how Gamal Abdel Nasser and the connections between Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism he forged, and the Suez Canal crisis propelled a new era in the Black discourse on Israel, envisioning Israel as a neo-colonial state set to protect Western interests in the Middle East.
Carver published hundreds of pages of recipes and farming techniques in Tuskegee bulletins, which the institution distributed to Black farmers who attended their agricultural extension programs. In ...the process, she packs a great deal of information into a book of only 121 pages, including notes. Because of Zafar's meticulous research, this reader came away with new information and inspired to dig into her citations in order to learn more. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and others railed against using popular ingredients, cooking styles, and recipes in the African American culinary lexicon, such as fatback and other cuts of pork, chicken, corn meal, collards, sweet potatoes, rice, alcohol, and deep-frying.
Adam Szetela criticizes Black Lives Matter for being a movement with extremely broad and unrealistic goals. If attention is restricted to what movement leaders say, then the criticism has merit. ...However, academic researchers have uncovered a wide range of the movement's outcomes, suggesting that Szetela's analysis is incomplete. I briefly argue that Black Lives Matter may have notable cultural and political impacts. I also argue that, contra Szetela, that the movement has the opportunity to avoid the obstacles that faced earlier Black nationalist movements.
Soulful Sancocho Steinitz, Matti
The Black scholar,
01/2022, Volume:
52, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
While soul music has often been celebrated as the ultimate expression of the US Black experience, I suggest that a closer look at the popularization of soul music in a Latin American country such as ...Panama might help to question one-dimensional nationalist interpretations of the genre. While Black Power anthems like James Brown's "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm proud" were clearly aimed at closing ranks among African Americans in the US, I argue that soul music in Panama often contributed to bui Iding bridges between Panama's Black Anglophone West Indian minority and the Spanish-speaking native population. It is in this spirit of complicating homogenizing and essentialist narratives of blackness and the prescribed meanings of Black popular culture that I aim to bring the concepts of post-soul and afrolatinidades into a dialogue with each other. In the same vein, it is this essays intention to contribute to the bridging of persistent demarcations between African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American Studies and further ongoing efforts for the development of a hemispheric perspective on the African diaspora in the Americas as proposed by Ifeoma Nwankwo and Agustin Lao-Montes.
In exile in Britain in 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie sent Malaku Bayen and his African-American wife Dorothy to raise money and support in the western hemisphere. There they created a weekly paper, ...the Voice of Ethiopia, and an organization, the Ethiopian World Federation, both explicitly directed to members of the African Diaspora. Drawing in enthusiastic African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, the VOE and EWF developed a new Black nationalism. Previous movements in the Diaspora had had hazy understandings of African cultures and history, believed in their duty to 'uplift' an allegedly backward Africa, and had been unable to establish a truly independent Black state. In contrast, the EWF promoted Ethiopia as the cultural-historical center for Black people across the globe; insisted that Ethiopia was an equal rather than junior partner in the process of modernization; and promised that Diasporic aid in liberating Ethiopia would be rewarded with a home in a strong, independent, Black state.
In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni ...Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement's radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement's growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights. Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.
LETTERS
First things (New York, N.Y.),
06/2020
Journal Article
Formalism makes mathematics a branch of logic by basing it on a set of axioms and then proceeding by classic reasoning to pure mathematics: algebra, geometry, topology, analysis, and mathematical ...logic itself. Numbers-whole, rational, irrational- exist in the minds that contemplate them, and the truths of arithmetic and algebra and calculus are discoverable by any rational mind, in any universe. Modern set theory had its birth with Georg Cantor's sensational discovery that the number of real numbers is a higher infinity than that of whole numbers (integers).
In notable ways, analysis of the Black Power Movement (BPM) by political scientists has been woefully neglected in comparison to analyses proffered by historians, sociologists, and Black Studies ...scholars. This comparative neglect is partly owed to political science's reticence to meaningfully engage the ideological locus of the BPM, black nationalism, through rigorous theoretical or methodological analysis. In this review, I highlight some of the major contributions of political scientists to the analysis of the BPM while exploring some of the challenges and opportunities for further study and examination of this singular period in US and international politics.
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