Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Foreword: Ideas in Unexpected Places, Davarian L. Baldwin Introduction: Brandon R. Byrd, Leslie M. Alexander, and Russell Rickford Section I: Intellectual Histories of Slavery’s Sexualities Section Introduction, Thavolia Glymph 1. The Greater Part of Slaveholders Are Licentious Men’: Articulating a Culture of Rape and Exploitation in the Slave South, Shannon C. Eaves 2. 'If I Had My Justice’: Freedwomen, the Freedman’s Bureau and Paternity in the Post-Emancipation South, Alexis Broderick 3. Hapticity and Soul Care: A Praxis for Understanding Bondwomen’s History, Deirdre Cooper Owens Section II: Abolitionism and Black Intellectual History Section Introduction, Kellie Carter-Jackson 4. Black Intellectual History in the Period of Abolition before Abolition, Vincent Caretta 5. Anti-Conquest and the Development of Anticolonialism after the Haitian Constitution of 1805, Marlene L. Daut 6. The International Dimensions of West Indies Emancipation Day Speeches, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Section III: Black Internationalism Section Introduction, Michael O. West 7. ‘A United and Valiant People’: Black Visions of Haiti at the Dawn of the Nineteenth Century, Leslie M. Alexander 8. ‘Give All Our Love to the Colored Folk’: African American families and Black Internationalism in 19th century Liberia, Jessica Millward 9. ‘The Happiest Peasants in the World’: W.E.B. Du Bois, Haiti, and Black Reconstruction, Brandon R. Byrd 10. ‘These People are No Charles Mansons or Spaced-out ‘Moonies’’: Jonestown and African-American Expatriation in the 1970s, Russell Rickford Section IV: Black Protest, Politics, and Power Section Introduction, N.D.B. Connolly 11. The Freedom News: Spatial Considerations of Intellectual Liberation during the Civil Rights Movement, William Sturkey 12. A Learning Laboratory of Liberation: Black Power and the Communiversity of Chicago, 1968-1975, Richard D. Benson II 13. Towards A Black Pacific: Leo Hannett and Black Power in Papua New Guinea, Quito Swan 14. Black Power in the Tradition of Radical Blackness, Charisse Burden-Stelly Section V: The Digital as Intellectual: Poetics and Possibilities Section Introduction, Marisa Parham 15. The Black Possible: Scenes from an Intellectual History of the Post-Digital Future, Alexis Pauline Gumbs 16. To Render a Landscape of Trauma: Deep Mapping a Historical Landscape of Domination—The Great Dismal Swamp, Christy Hyman 17. ‘All the Stars are Closer’: Fugitives in the Machine & Black Resistance in a Digital Age, Jessica Marie Johnson

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.

Review :
“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