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.
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
