Review: African American Political Thought: A Collected History

In 1935 W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.” In his contribution to African American Political Thought: A Collected History, Paul C. Taylor cites this statement as “the founding move of black politics in an antiblack world.” Taylor and Du Bois write in response to a worldwide disavowal of specifically black and common humanity. These statements thereby suggest that the stakes of black politics, through the specificity of blackness, actually exceed any putatively discrete ‘black issue.’ Perhaps black political thought also challenges delimitations of the ‘political’ by centering different concepts of humanity and the world. The publication of Melvin T. Rogers’ and Jack Turner’s African American Political Thought: A Collected History addresses this persistent circumscription of blackness in mainstream political questions and frames.

Rogers and Turner have assembled a collection of African American political thought covering a stunning range of time and ideas. Consistent with Taylor’s emphasis on the fullness of black humanity, the editors distinguish their anthology from earlier collections of African American thinking by centering singular thinkers, rather than outlining broad traditions or ideologies. African American Political Thought: A Collected History consists of 30 chapters, each written by a distinguished contemporary scholar about one writer, from Phillis Wheatley and her pre-revolutionary writings to present public intellectual Cornel West. Given its scope, the book maintains a sense of continuity through a plethora of resonances between its chapters. The collection boasts a variety of interpretative approaches and scales of analysis and is notable for its attention to a range of rhetorical strategies and expressive genres: sermons, slave narratives, satire, Supreme Court opinions.

While Du Bois pushes us to reconceptualize the human, Rogers and Turner also invite us to reconceptualize the American. Though their Introduction is titled “Political Theorizing in Black,” Rogers and Turner center American blackness by largely limiting the book to the thinking of African American citizens of the United States (with the telling exceptions of Wheatley and those born before the 14^th Amendment of 1868), in alignment with the book’s title on African American political thought. Though born in the Caribbean, Garvey, James, and Kwame Ture (Carmichael) each spent many years in the United States and engaged US audiences. An anthology of black political thought might investigate black thinking beyond American contexts and thereby further pressure the categorical limits of the ‘political,’ especially if ‘political thought’ is to always concern a state, as key terms like rights and democracy seem to require. Rogers and Turner recognize this pressure when they write, “including black thinkers within the study of American political thought requires us to recast the very terms of study, to reconstitute our understanding of American political thought itself.” They continue:

Broadening and deepening our conception of the African American tradition of American political thought revolutionizes the study of American political thought as a whole: it pluralizes our sense of what kinds of political stances and argumentative outlooks count as American, and it moves the primary concerns of African American political thought—racial slavery, white supremacy, gendered violence—to the center of a field of inquiry traditionally focused on federalism, natural rights, constitutional law, and popular sovereignty.

While it is easy to imagine additional expansions and revisions to the practices of political theory and canon formation, a broader scope than what Rogers and Turner have remarkably already achieved would likely have been too unwieldy for a single collection.

The anthology often takes literary productions to be just as political as more overtly political papers. This attention to form and style as politically relevant carries through several chapters on African American poets and novelists. Literary subjects include: poet Phillis Wheatley (discussed by Vincent Carretta), autobiographist Harriet Jacobs (Nick Bromell), novelist Zora Neal Hurston (Farah Jasmine Smith), satirist George S. Schuyler (Jeffrey B. Ferguson), poet Langston Hughes (Jason Frank), novelist Richard Wright (Tommie Shelby), novelist Ralph Ellison (Danielle Allen), novelist James Baldwin (John E. Drabinski), novelist Toni Morrison (Lawrie Balfour), and poet Audre Lorde (Jack Turner). Notably, additional subjects of the collection who are not typically recognized as literary figures also wrote novels (W.E.B. Du Bois) and autobiographies (Du Bois, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis), suggesting a crossing of genre distinctions in African American writing that might itself be considered a kind of political thought.

Even in his chapter on the more strictly activist writer David Walker, Rogers centers rhetorical considerations in political thought. Vincent Carretta also establishes the political affordances of literary devices in the very first chapter of the collection. “Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race” calls readers to think beyond the undeniable political importance of the fact that Wheatley wrote to consider what and especially how she wrote; Wheatley’s strategic similes emphasized colonists’ hypocrisy in calling for their own freedom while perpetuating slavery. Lawrie Balfour’s Chapter 24, “Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy” also emphasizes the importance of fiction to political reimagining. She elaborates certain characters in Morrison’s novels as “subjects-in-flight” who make it possible to think of democracy as a mode of being rather than a form of state. Balfour balances the potential freedom in fugitivity with how the state’s recognition or construct of fugitivity can justify violence. This chapter ultimately recalls Morrison’s hope for “forms of home where it is possible to be [in Morrison’s words, both] ‘free and situated.'”

While the editors clearly see political value in aesthetics, they conclude their introduction by putting the aesthetic and the political in tension. Citing Socrates’ claim that the truth “will come unadorned” while “beautifully spoken speeches” mask lies, the authors argue that “the language of innocence and the necessity of progress are to America what the adorned and beautiful speeches were to Athenians.” Yet the authors immediately cite James Baldwin, whose writing they seem to recognize as both beautiful and true. How might we then distinguish the ‘beauty’ of flattery that the authors warn against and the beauty that is so apparent in much of the writing in this collection, a beauty that attends effective communication and perhaps even works to convince readers of unflattering truths? Perhaps flattery and rhetorical fallacies are better terms for critique here, though a political concept of beauty remains to be thought throughout and beyond its invocation in this collection.

The editors recognize the disproportion of men to women subjects in their collection, and the same applies to the contributors. While proportionally more subjects were active in the second half of the 20^th century than any other period, only three are currently living (Angela Davis, Clarence Thomas, and Cornel West). Readers might further explore the depth of black feminist and black queer thought that proliferated in this later period, from the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) and landmark All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave (1982), through contemporaries like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, and Cathy Cohen. African American Political Thought: A Collected History might also easily inspire readers to further pursue specific ideas and periods as developed in recent publications. For example, Mark Christian Thompson’s new Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (2022) focuses on the 1960s as a turning point in Black political thought toward the ontological, and Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) takes up the role of art in providing the imprisoned with political voices and media in which to theorize freedom.

The time and care Rogers and Turner invested in this project from its conception in 2007 and compilation over 10 years is evident in its comprehensiveness and thorough introduction. The credentials of the contributors to this collection are astonishing and the oeuvre of each in their own right is worth reading further; the final pages of the volume helpfully highlight previous writings by each author. For instance, Taylor’s Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016) offers a compelling introduction for readers interested in questions of the aesthetic raised here. Several contributors, like Farah Jasmine Smith, Brandon M. Terry, and Nikhil Pal Singh, also produce more public-facing work that might be helpful starting places for non-academic readers. In addition to those discussed above, highly distinguished contributors include Robert Gooding-Williams, Naomi Murakawa, Anthony Bogues, Carol Wayne White, and many others.