Heroism and the Black Intellectual

Heroism and the Black Intellectual
Author: Jerry Gafio Watts
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807866237

Before and after writing Invisible Man, novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison fought to secure a place as a black intellectual in a white-dominated society. In this sophisticated analysis of Ellison's cultural politics, Jerry Watts examines the ways in which black artists and thinkers attempt to establish creative intellectual spaces for themselves. Using Ellison as a case study, Watts makes important observations about the role of black intellectuals in America today. Watts argues that black intellectuals have had to navigate their way through a society that both denied them the resources, status, and encouragement available to their white peers and alienated them from the rest of their ethnic group. For Ellison to pursue meaningful intellectual activities in the face of this marginalization demanded creative heroism, a new social and artistic stance that challenges cultural stereotypes. For example, Ellison first created an artistic space for himself by associating with Communist party literary circles, which recognized the value of his writing long before the rest of society was open to his work. In addition, to avoid prescriptive white intellectual norms, Ellison developed his own ideology, which Watts terms the 'blues aesthetic.' Watts's ambitious study reveals a side of Ellison rarely acknowledged, blending careful criticism of art with a wholesale engagement with society.

The Need for Heroes

The Need for Heroes
Author: Arthur Alfonso Schomburg
Publisher: Editora Funmilayo Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781999675691

Beyond the Stereotypes: Celebrating Black Heroes Through Powerful Essays For too long, Black heroes have been relegated to the margins of history, their stories untold or overshadowed by a narrow narrative. This groundbreaking anthology helps shatter that silence. The Need for Heroes brings together a chorus of brilliant Black voices from Brazil and the USA-scholars, activists, and leaders who examine the lives and legacies of Black heroes from all walks of life. In these pages, William Cooper Nell, George Washington Williams, Manuel R. Querino, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, J. A. Rogers, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Elizabeth Ross Haynes explore the complexities of Black heroism, delving beyond one-dimensional portrayals to reveal a rich tapestry of achievements. Gain a deeper understanding of Black history and culture through these insightful and inspiring essays, including a foreword by the bibliophile and Black vindicationist Arthur Schomburg and an afterword by the Brazilian historian Flávio Gomes. The Need for Heroes is a must-read for anyone seeking a more complete picture of heroism, one that reflects the full spectrum of human experience. It is a celebration of Black excellence, and a powerful testament to the enduring human spirit. From the editor and publisher of Manuel Querino (1851-1923): An Afro-Brazilian Pioneer in the Age of Scientific Racism (2021)

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka
Author: Jerry Watts
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2001-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0814793738

In a chapter sure to prove controversial, Watts links Baraka's famous misogyny to an attempt to bury his own homosexual past."--BOOK JACKET.

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
Author: Mia E. Bay
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469620928

Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.

Characters of Blood

Characters of Blood
Author: Celeste-Marie Bernier
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 815
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813933250

Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition. In Characters of Blood, Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminates the ways in which six iconic men and women—Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman—challenged the dominant conceptualizations of their histories and played a key role in the construction of an alternative visual and textual archive. While these figures have survived as symbolic touchstones, Bernier contends that scholars have yet to do justice to their complex bodies of work or their multifaceted lives. Adopting a comparative and transatlantic approach to her subjects’ remarkable life stories, the author analyzes a wealth of creative work—from literature, drama, and art to public monuments, religious tracts, and historical narratives—to show how it represents enslaved heroism throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. In mapping this black diasporic tradition of resistance, Bernier intends not only to reveal the limitations and distortions on record but also to complicate the definitions of black heroism that have been restricted by ideological boundaries between heroic and anti-heroic sites and sights of struggle.

The Black Intellectual Tradition

The Black Intellectual Tradition
Author: Derrick P. Alridge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252052757

Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
Author: Harold Cruse
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 620
Release: 2005-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781590171356

Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual electrified a generation of activists and intellectuals. The product of a lifetime of struggle and reflection, Cruse's book is a singular amalgam of cultural history, passionate disputation, and deeply considered analysis of the relationship between American blacks and American society. Reviewing black intellectual life from the Harlem Renaissance through the 1960s, Cruse discusses the legacy (and offers memorably acid-edged portraits) of figures such as Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin, arguing that their work was marked by a failure to understand the specifically American character of racism in the United States. This supplies the background to Cruse's controversial critique of both integrationism and black nationalism and to his claim that black Americans will only assume a just place within American life when they develop their own distinctive centers of cultural and economic influence. For Cruse's most important accomplishment may well be his rejection of the clichés of the melting pot in favor of a vision of Americanness as an arena of necessary and vital contention, an open and ongoing struggle.

Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America

Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America
Author: Brian D. Behnken
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496813669

Contributions by Tunde Adeleke, Brian D. Behnken, Minkah Makalani, Benita Roth, Gregory D. Smithers, Simon Wendt, and Danielle L. Wiggins Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historically maligned by their peers and by the lay public as inauthentic or illegitimate, black intellectuals have found their work misused, ignored, or discarded. Black intellectuals have also been reductively placed into one or two main categories: they are usually deemed liberal or, less frequently, as conservative. The contributors to this volume explore several prominent intellectuals, from left-leaning leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois to conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, from well-known black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins to Marxists like Claudia Jones, to underscore the variety of black intellectual thought in the United States. Contributors also situate the development of the lines of black intellectual thought within the broader history from which these trends emerged. The result gathers essays that offer entry into a host of rich intellectual traditions.

New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition

New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition
Author: Keisha N. Blain
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 081013814X

From well-known intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Nella Larsen to often-obscured thinkers such as Amina Baraka and Bernardo Ruiz Suárez, black theorists across the globe have engaged in sustained efforts to create insurgent and resilient forms of thought. New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition is a collection of twelve essays that explores these and other theorists and their contributions to diverse strains of political, social, and cultural thought. The book examines four central themes within the black intellectual tradition: black internationalism, religion and spirituality, racial politics and struggles for social justice, and black radicalism. The essays identify the emergence of black thought within multiple communities internationally, analyze how black thinkers shaped and were shaped by the historical moment in which they lived, interrogate the ways in which activists and intellectuals connected their theoretical frameworks across time and space, and assess how these strains of thought bolstered black consciousness and resistance worldwide. Defying traditional temporal and geographical boundaries, New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition illuminates the origins of and conduits for black ideas, redefines the relationship between black thought and social action, and challenges long-held assumptions about black perspectives on religion, race, and radicalism. The intellectuals profiled in the volume reshape and redefine the contours and boundaries of black thought, further illuminating the depth and diversity of the black intellectual tradition.

Heroism in the New Black Poetry

Heroism in the New Black Poetry
Author: D.H. Melhem
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813189888

D.H. Melhem's clear introductions and frank interviews provide insight into the contemporary social and political consciousness of six acclaimed poets: Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall, and Sonia Sanchez. Since the 1960s, the poet hero has characterized a significant segment of Black American poetry. The six poets interviewed here have participated in and shaped the vanguard of this movement. Their poetry reflects the critical alternatives of African American life—separatism and integration, feminism and sexual identity, religion and spirituality, humanism and Marxism, nationalism and internationalism. They unite in their commitment to Black solidarity and advancement.