First published in 2003. This pioneering new book surveys the political thought of a selection of influential black thinkers in provocative exploration of the black radical tradition as it has evolved in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. Each chapter focuses on key figures or social movement including the slave Cugoano, the American anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, C.L.R. James, W.E.B Du Bois, former leader of the anti-colonial movement in Tanzania Julius Nyerere, Walter Rodney, the political philosophy of Rastafari, and the activist-musician Bob Marley. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of radical black thought and the development of an activist political tradition.

Reshaping Beloved Community: The Experiences of Black Male Felons and Their Impact on Black Radical Traditions offers a reflexive interrogation on the history of black male incarceration in the United States starting in the nineteenth century to both illustrate the complex ways black male felons have been discursively constructed and the various techniques utilized in the United States to erase the contributions of black male felons and their black radical projects. This erasure has left many black men without the benefit of fellowship and community. Therefore, Reshaping Beloved Community focuses on particular black male felons and their cultural production to highlight experiences of blackness that is often marginalized or ignored. In order to characterize these experiences and contributions of black male felons, Reshaping Beloved Community expands Victor Anderson’s definition of creative exchange by offering contemplative conversations of black male felons in history and the cultural works they produced. It draws on an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how some black male felons have used prison and the experience of incarceration to craft narratives and liberation movements. The philosophical approach within Reshaping Beloved Community deploys constructive and innovative concepts, particularly of the grotesque, to interpret how black male felons have resisted American political and cultural restraints on their humanity. Anderson’s concepts of creative exchange help create a framework that enables readers to see how the cultural production of black male felons reveals the unique experiences and worldview of black men trapped in various forms of penal captivity. These experiences speak to a deeper reality that is largely hidden because of the ways incarceration and penal captivity diminishes certain people in society. Yet a reengagement with those movements helps to link black male felons to the whole of black life and culture. In the end, Reshaping Beloved Community allows black radical scholars to gain deeper insight into the roles black male felons have played in critiquing American politics and culture. Moreover, it shows that the cultural productions of black male felons are just as important to understanding black life in American society as slave narratives, blues music, and the like.

This volume chronicles the development of communication studies as a discipline, providing a history of the field and identifying opportunities for future growth. Editors Pat J. Gehrke and William M. Keith have assembled an exceptional list of communication scholars who, in the thirteen chapters contained in this book, cover the breadth and depth of the field. Organized around themes and concepts that have enduring historical significance and wide appeal across numerous subfields of communication, A Century of Communication Studies bridges research and pedagogy, addressing themes that connect classroom practice and publication. Published in the 100th anniversary year of the National Communication Association, this collection highlights the evolution of communication studies and will serve future generations of scholars as a window into not only our past but also the field’s collective possibilities.

Mark Anthony Neal reads the story of black communities through the black tradition in popular music. His history challenges the view that hip-hop was the first black cultural movement to speak truth to power.

This volume investigates the often-overlooked African presence in Asia, determining how many of these diasporic populations fared in the context of political independence, globalization / economic marginalization, and the presence of ethnic conflict and institutional racism, e...

From its inception, black studies has been transnational. Pioneering intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Nicolas Guillen, C. L. R. James, Oliver Cox, and Zora Neale Hurston shared a transnational sensibility shaped by the antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, however, much scholarship regarding blackness has been presented under the rubric of pan-Africanism or the African diaspora, terms that imply an inquiry solely into what it means to be "of Africa." Increasingly, in an era of globalization and postcolonialism, such terms have become insufficient for capturing what it means to be black in a global context. Transnational black studies--an interdisciplinary arena of knowledge rooted in political struggle--has reemerged to rectify this discursive insufficiency in contemporary scholarship. The essays, interviews, and reviews in this special issue of Radical History Review represent the best of the new of this very old tradition of transnational black studies. One contributor explores how "racial citizenship"--the idea of belonging and solidarity across the black world, developed as a result of knowledge formed out of transnational linkages--is employed by Cubans of color fighting against racial discrimination in public spaces in Havana. Another, by outlining a research agenda for the study of African slavery in the Middle East and South Asia, reminds us that the Africa diaspora is global. In a discussion of a paradigm shift from the national to the global, yet another author makes a singular contribution to this collection by locating new spaces for identity formation "in transit." Contributors. Martha Biondi, Anthony Bogues, Ashley Dawson, James Early, Mary F. E. Ebeling, Kevin Gaines, Van Gosse, Frank A. Guridy, Joseph E. Harris, Douglas M. Haynes, Joseph Heathcott, Harvey Neptune, Michelle Stephens

This collection of essays attempts to expand the notion of the «Black Atlantic» beyond its original racial, geographical, linguistic and cultural borders while acknowledging its remarkable ability to disturb established historical truths and to go beyond traditional dichotomies, thereby providing an essential tool for cross-cultural understanding. It is divided into four sections, each of them dealing with a different approach to the question of the «Black Atlantic». «Definitions» touches on the various limitations of Gilroy's original concept. «Readings» focuses on how the «Black Atlantic» can be productively used in readings of certain literary texts. «Practices» shifts towards the practical applications of the concept in order to explore the impact it has had on academic disciplines and examine to what extent it may have altered their epistemology and working procedures. Finally, «Dialogues» engages with the «Black Atlantic» from the perspectives of two creative writers whose work includes transatlantic themes and characters.

Contains primary source material.