Ideas in Unexpected Places

“The contributors to Ideas in Unexpected Place: Reimagining Black Intellectual History offer insightful and innovative explorations into the possibilities of the undertheorized field of Black intellectual history in the United States and the vast African diaspora from the early nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Challenging conventional notions of what it means to be an intellectual, the thought-provoking essays in this volume will undoubtedly influence future debates and cross-generational dialogues about how diverse groups of Black thinkers and activists made sense of their worlds.” —Pero G. Dagbovie, author of African American History Reconsidered  

“Ideas in Unexpected Places is a timely, cohesive, and critical volume that seeks to push, and even trouble, how historians of African American intellectual history, and historians of intellectual history more broadly, define, investigate, and document Black intellectual history. Challenging historians to reconsider the production of Black intellectual thought and activity, the methodologies historians deploy to explore these subjects, and the primary sources that form the bases of their analyses, the collection succeeds in making a well-organized and crucial contribution to current debates about the limits and violence of the archive, the privileging of certain voices and perspectives over others in historical argumentation, the contours of Black agency, the ideological and geographical origins of Black Power, the intellectual production of Black women, Black international solidarities, and documenting and disseminating Black histories in a digital age.” —D’Weston Haywood, author of Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement

“Ideas in Unexpected Places powerfully captures the remarkable impact of the African American Intellectual History Society in shaping—and significantly expanding—the field of Black intellectual history. The volume brings together an array of talented scholars who offer brilliant insights that will forever change how we write about Black thought, history, and culture.” —Keisha N. Blain, author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

“This is a broadly conceived project that is expansive and forward-looking while attendant to a tradition of scholarship and epistemology emanating from the African diaspora. Familiar subjects of history are given new light, new treatment . . . a welcome contribution to the field of intellectual history.” —Christopher M. Tinson, author of Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s