Theorizing Black Studies: Thinking Black Intellectuals

Overview

Frederick Douglas

The recent election to the U.S. Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama II—a constitutional law scholar of Kenyan and American heritage—is bound to have both profound and subtle effects on black intellectuals and the content of their work, as well as on their public profiles, representations in and engagements with popular media, and relationships with the communities from which they hail and the academic and artistic communities in which they work. The meaning of Obama’s election, particularly to how we understand and utilize "race" as a category around which analyses of contemporary politics and culture are organized, is both tremendously significant and highly contested. It is in these contexts that we ask, "What does it mean to be a black intellectual today"?

The title "Thinking Black Intellectuals" is intended as both a pun and a provocation; the purpose of this event is to theorize black intellectual life in the early 21st century from the multiple disciplinary vantage points of African & African-American Studies. The intention here is also to do, i.e. to demonstrate what thinking black intellectuals do and to present and analyze the work that is produced by that activity. "Thinking Black Intellectuals" intends to avoid reproducing the debate about black public intellectuals that took place in the early- to mid-1990s, which pitted Afrocentrists against practitioners of critical theory and focused on a handful of prominent scholars. This event represents an evolution in African & African-American Studies away from such arguments; the assumption is that to be an intellectual is already, in one form or another, to participate in public life. Similarly, the event’s purpose is not to define intellectuals or to worry over who fits or does not fit the definition of an intellectual. "Thinking Black Intellectuals" is rather a demonstration, celebration, and assertion of intellectual production in a multiplicity of forms throughout the African diaspora. Moreover, this event respectfully responds to the deep investment in critical thought demonstrated by the life and career of abolitionist, statesman, man-of-letters, and prominent Rochesterian, Frederick Douglass.