African American Political Thought: A Collected History

Description

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour. While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West. Front Matter Contents Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction 1 Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race 2 David Walker: Citizenship, Judgment, Freedom, and Solidarity 3 Martin Delany’s Two Principles, the Argument for Emigration, and Revolutionary Black Nationalism 4 Harriet Jacobs: Prisoner of Hope 5 Frederick Douglass: Nonsovereign Freedom and the Pluralityof Political Resistance 6 Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism 7 Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception 8 Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence 9 Ida B. Wells on Racial Criminalization 10 W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro- modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality 11 Marcus Garvey: The Black Prince? 12 A. Philip Randolph: Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race 13 Zora Neale Hurston’s Radical Individualism 14 George S. Schuyler: Post- Souls Satirist 15 C. L. R. James: Race, Revolution, and Black Liberation 16 Langston Hughes’s Ambivalent Political Expressivism 17 Thurgood Marshall: The Legacy and Limits of Equality under the Law 18 Richard Wright: Realizing the Promise of the West 19 Bayard Rustin: Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought 20 Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist 21 James Baldwin: Democracy between Nihilism and Hope 22 Malcolm X: Dispatches on Racial Cruelty 23 Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force 24 Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy 25 Audre Lorde’s Politics of Difference 26 Stokely Carmichael and the Longing for Black Liberation: Black Power and Beyond 27 Huey P. Newton and the Last Days of the Black Colony 28 Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom 29 Clarence Thomas: Race Pessimism and Black Capitalism 30 Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Tradition Acknowledgments Index Contributors