Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon(Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies)

Angela Davis is iconic as an international figure but few recognize the educational, political and ideological contexts that formed the public persona. Excavating layers of networks, activists, academics, polemicists, and funders across the ideological spectrum, Joy James studies the paradigms and platforms that leveraged Angela Davis into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual. Beginning in Alabama in 1944 with Davis's birthplace and ending in California in 1970 with a surrogate political family, James investigates context in order to better understand the agency and identity of Davis. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US: AntiBlack repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergrad and graduate schooling-all interconnect and play a part in Davis's rise in stature from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later. Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James highlights of the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and shows how a triumphal figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples' victory.

Table of Contents:
Series Editor Preface Preface: Cold War as Context Acknowledgments Introduction I. Socialization and Education 1. “Sweet Home Alabama” 2. Sallye Davis's Red Diaper Babies 3. Student Assimilationists and Rebels 4. From “Bombingham” to the Big Apple 5. Traumatic Awakenings in Devastated Children II. University 6. Undergrad 7. Marcuse's “Most Famous Student” 8. 1967 Entry Points 9. Philosophy Professor and Communist Target III. Political Activism 10. Not Your Mother's CPUSA: The Che-Lumumba Club 11. Doppelganger Panther Women: Roberta Alexander, Fania Davis Jordan, Angela Davis 12. Queering Radicalism: On Tour with Oakland Panthers and Jean Genet 13. Crucibles Conclusion: Context and Democracy Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Joy James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, USA. She is the editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998) and the author of several noted books and publications on feminism, critical race theory, political prisoners, and democratic politics. Her most recent books include New Bones Abolition (2023) and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2023).

Review :
Excavating and connecting layers of the ideological influences on Angela Davis's familial, educational, activist and academic experiences, Joy James provides an incisive transdisciplinary analysis of paths taken by the world-renowned human rights advocate, feminist and abolitionist. Adroitly avoiding hagiography while embracing inevitable contradictions, James offers nuanced context with which to reflect not only on an iconic progressive figure of our times, but indeed the imperative of critical praxis that planetary antiblackness permanently engenders. Joy James the activist, as well as Joy James the intellectual, is an indispensable thinker; one of five people who I trust to contextualize the 1960s/70s. This book is a compassionate biography of Angela Davis which does not slide into hagiography, written by the Ida B. Wells of our time. Joy James offers a crisply written intellectual and political biography of Angela Y. Davis, one of the world's most iconic radical feminist leaders. Drawing on a range of materialist and transdisciplinary approaches, James's argument is impeccably evidenced and thoughtful in its methods. James humanizes Davis through detailed attention to the trajectory of her life and work. This is a riveting work.