Quote: Robin D. G. Kelley (on Cedric Robinson)

"When Cedric [J. Robinson] submitted his dissertation for approval, the faculty did not know what to make of it. One by one, individual members resigned from his committee citing an inability to understand the work. No one could reasonably reject a thesis so sound, elegant, and erudite, but few were willing to sign off. Only after Cedric threatened legal action was his thesis finally accepted—nearly four years later. Finding a publisher proved equally frustrating. When SUNY Press finally released the book, now titled The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership in 1980, it was thoroughly ignored and soon disappeared. (Fortunately, the University of North Carolina Press brought it back into print with a brilliant foreword by Erica Edwards, giving the book a new life and the attention it deserved thirty-five years ago.)"

"As they awaited Stanford’s decision, Cedric accepted a position as Lecturer in Political Science and Black Studies at the University of Michigan from 1971 to 1973. His appointment was partly the product of student struggles waged by the Black Action Movement the previous year. Cedric and Elizabeth joined a community of radical and progressive blackmarxismintellectuals, including Harold Cruse, anthropologist Mick Taussig, Africanist historian Joel Samoff, cultural critic Marshall Sahlins, and Archie Singham, noted scholar of Caribbean and African politics. Elizabeth returned to school, earning an M.A. in Anthropology from U of M. Together they devoted much of their energy to the graduate students, hosting regular seminars and workshops in their home, feeding and nurturing a generation who would reshape Black Studies. Darryl Thomas, then a first-year grad student in Political Science, found these gatherings invaluable: “That community remained a source of strength and survival long after the Robinsons’ departure from the university in 1973. The workshop exemplified how to pursue the type of interdisciplinary research and scholarship originally imagined by the students and faculty members who led the insurrections that created Black studies."
-- Robin D. G. Kelley, "Cedric J. Robinson: the Making of a Black Radical Intellectual," Counterpunch, June 17, 2016.

(Cedric J. Robinson (b. 1940), one of the towering figures in the development of Black Studies, died on June 5, 2016.)

Fall Semester's Embers

It's nearly January, which is another way of saying that the fall semester has raced past and is now over. In addition to marking my return from my spring sabbatical, this term also included my first stint as full-time chair of African American and African Studies. At the same time, as I've chronicled to some extent here, these last few months have also included a mini-book tour, which encompassed stops on both coasts. The combination--and pace--of the teaching, administration and travel has worn me out, so I'm truly grateful for the holiday break, though as I was able to share during the final course meeting with my students in "Foundations of Literary Study," the undergraduate course I taught this fall, no matter how tired I felt on the Monday following my trips or reading through a stack of papers, I experienced a surge of exhilaration once I entered the classroom. I also had the benefit of an exceptional teaching assistant, award-winning writer Drew Ciccolo, who graduated from Rutgers-Newark's MFA program and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in American Studies at the university. To Drew, a million thanks many times over!

Although I'd taught this course once before, in the fall of 2013, I decided to update it with some new works and slightly modify my approach, using post-colonialism as our underlying theoretical approach, since it struck me as salient in light of contemporary national and global events. We looked at five genres, in the following order: creative and critical nonfiction; poetry; drama; fiction; and graphic novels. Among the new works I added were Akhil Sharma's acclaimed novel Family Life, poems by Mónica de la Torre, Monica Ong, and Edward Baugh (who read on campus this fall), and stories by Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jaquira Díaz. I also retained components that had worked before, like the transcription-and-commentary exercise involving Emily Dickinson's texts online at the Boston Public Library's Flickr page, Shakespeare's sonnets as our introduction to the poetry unit, and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" to teach the fixed form of the villanelle, but added a new exercise, involving use of Google's n-gram tool, as a way of exploring the field and practice of distant reading. For a change I threw in a few pop quizzes, the first of which appeared to serve as a spur for some in the class to read a bit further in the assigned longer works than they had been.

What worked particularly well was the requirement of multiple short papers (7 in total) and research and creative exercises (4) in building up my students' critical and literary skills. The two-stage final, in which they submitted half their final papers to me in order to ensure that their arguments were on track, also worked well. For those students who failed to submit the first half of their papers, however, the results were less positive. Nevertheless, many of the final papers did show some evident improvement in some way over their authors' initial submissions in the course's early weeks, and even in those cases where the technical aspects of the writing were still shaky, I could at least perceive an improved sense of confidence in argumentation.

Emily Dickinson,
Ms. Am. 1093(3),
Boston Public Library
(Flickr.com)

To conclude the class I decided to try something new this time. Since I was teaching an intro to literary studies course for English majors, I held a book raffle of extra copies of wonderful books on my office shelf, with everyone picking a number attached to a book, and then calling out the numbers, with each student receiving a book. Since some did not show up, I allowed everyone who'd gotten a book to exchange it at the end of class. A few did, and they snapped every single poetry text (by Van Jordan, Tyehimba Jess, Allen Ginsberg, Kristiana Rae Colón, etc.), along with fiction books by Junot Díaz, Michael Lukas, and others. Sadly, no one appeared to want the volumes by Raymond Carver or Ray Bradbury!

I also asked the students to write a letter to future students, detailing what they found useful in the course and what they would change or wanted more of. (I'd just seen someone else suggest this.) I was curious to see their assessments, in order to incorporate them into future iterations of this class.
Among the comments: "I would like a bigger selection of poetry only because I love poetry and diving into poetic devices and how they're used in other forms of literature (or vice versa)." And: "I started [to] love authors like Junior Díaz and I loved reading the Shakespeare play and I wish we could have studied more on those authors, but then I would have never learned what a travel narrative is or even given a chance to graphic novels that are not comic books. Odd assignment like the Emily Dickinson [manuscript] decipherment was brilliant." And: "Thankfully we do not only read white, male, cis, heterosexual authors!" And: "Side effects may include: interest in literary research; improved writing; appreciation/admiration for what at first seemed boring; drowsiness/fascination by Roland Barthes' theory regarding 'The Death of the Author'...."

And now, it's just a matter of entering those final grades!

James Baldwin Conference at Université Paul-Valéry

The James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter conference is underway at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, and it has been an amazing experience thus far. Organized by D. Quentin Miller of Suffolk University and Claudine Raynaud of Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, the conference has brought together many of the major scholars of Baldwin's work, as well as creative writers, filmmakers, longtime friends of Baldwin, and graduate students now in the process of writing and thinking about Baldwin's life, work and legacy.

Thus far there have been several keynote talks. Yesterday David Leeming, widely considered one of the leading Baldwin scholars and his major biographer, delivered the first, offering personal anecdotes about his experiences with "Jimmy," with one highlight an extraordinary story about the time he collected painter-seer Beauford Delaney from his Paris apartment-temple, though only after lying head to head with him on cots, in a sheet-draped room, and talking about everything for five days. He then drove Delaney and another poet to Baldwin's lodgings in Istanbul, and to keep Delaney from running off (he was falling apart mentally) had to hold him in bed to keep him lying down.

Today Magdalena Zaborowska, author of the award-winning James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke, 2009), who talked about Baldwin's final home in St. Paul de Vence, France, and how we might recover from "the material the metaphorical," and "the literal the literary" new ways of thinking about Baldwin's archive. One aspect of her forthcoming project that I found particularly fascinating was her discussion of how Baldwin's interest in certain women in his life increased toward the end of his life, and in his clothing and mannerisms began to play with gender more openly. She linked these shifts to his final work, The Welcome Table, which captured both this turn and social aspects of his life, including his relationships with women friends, in his final days.

On a plenary panel yesterday author and screenwriter Cecil Brown spoke about his friendship with Baldwin from the early 1970s on, when Baldwin was being heavily surveilled by the FBI and carefully considering the terms of his exile. A number of his anecdotes centered on time he spent with Baldwin at the house in St. Paul de Vence, and on the relative rarity in those days, compared with today, of American black people in France. Some of Brown's comments veered into problematic territory and his comments today in response to a presentation again did so, but one way of looking at this was that he was giving his unvarnished truth, offensive as it might be. Jacqueline Jones Compaore, who was Baldwin's student during his stint at the western Massachusetts 5-college system, joined him on the plenary panel, talking quite movingly of Baldwin as a teacher who could terrify students by challenging their BS outright, but also showed great care for many of them and deeply inspired her. 

Amidst the keynotes have been full days of panels, on all aspects of Baldwin, from discussions of music in his work to his public and private lives to a digital annotations project now underway to to his transatlanticism. My panel, on new approaches, was the first of this afternoon, and I gave an abridged (because of time) version of a paper on "queer futurity" and James Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head, which I think even more now having reread and thought about it carefully deserves to have much stronger cases made on its behalf. It is a novel in which nearly all of Baldwin's concerns come together--often felicitously but sometimes not--with some of his most astonishing prose, and, as David Leeming noted in his talk, it is a "experimental," often shocking work that rewards its reader in multiple ways.

The other panelist's talks, Brian Norman's on the "Cassandra effect" of Baldwin's use--the "ventriloquism" of him after his death--and Nigel Hatton's, on his work teaching Baldwin's fiction to young people in prison, and including the great writer's work in the field of narrative medicine, were excellent. Other panels have ranged widely, but in general, have provided a rich critical engagement with every aspect of James Baldwin the artist, the intellectual, the critic, the theorist, the activist, the visionary, the man. Concluding the today's session was a screening of The Price of the Ticket, with filmmaker Karen Thorsen present to discuss many aspects of her process, her contact with Baldwin, some particulars of the film, and related anecdotes. I have seen this film before, but hearing her provide background information enriched my thinking about it. There's one more day of Baldwiniana, and I'm looking forward to it and to seeing more of Montpellier!

First morning registration

The organizers, D. Quentin Miller
and Claudine Raynaud

Dennis Tyler, who gave the first talk
of the day, and D. Quentin Miller

David Leeming

Site St Charles, Université Paul-Valéry

Cecil Brown and Jacqueline Jones Compaore

Anti-fascist posters near the university 

Jezy Gray, Ed Pavlic, giving his paper,
and Quentin Miller 

Magdalena Zaborowska,
at right, at her keynote 

Actor and videographer Samuel
Légitimus, founder of the
Collectif James Baldwin

Rasheeda Briggs, Monica Miller,
and Christopher Driscoll

Semester's/First Year's End + Congratulations to 2013 Graduates

It seems hard to believe, but as of today I have concluded my spring semester and first year teaching at Rutgers-Newark. I've graded the exams, read, reread and assigned grades to the final papers, signed off on MFA theses and an undergraduate honors thesis, and reviewed the work of my independent study student. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE GRADUATING STUDENTS! I now have only to complete an assessment for my department and the undergraduate college, and I believe I will be fully done until this fall, a few administrative tasks notwithstanding.

On Twitter I described the experience as "exhilarating", and it was, though I also feel mentally and physically drained as I do at the end of every term, the spring/summer ones perhaps even more so than the fall ones, since no matter where I have taught, far more occurs from January to June than September to December. I designed and taught four new classes, which is unsurprising considering that this was a new job, but as anyone who teaches regularly will attest, new courses, especially at a new institution, require a tremendous amount of work, and since none of these was a repurposed course from my prior institutions, they entailed even more work and planning than ever before.

I have already written about the fall courses (an undergraduate Afro-Latin literature course, and a graduate course for English and American Studies under the Topics in Post-Modernism rubric on post-humanism and trans-humanism), so I'll say a little about the two spring courses, one a jointly listed course in English and African American and African Studies (AAAS) on the Black Arts Movement, and the second the spring half of the year-long, introductory survey course for AAAS. I enjoyed both, though I must admit I particularly loved the literature class, which took place at 8:30 AM and meant very early Sunday and Wednesday nights for me, as well as arriving in Newark when almost no one was on the street. My first morning I tweeted how shuttered everything was at 7:30 AM, and my colleague Tayari Jones, though on sabbatical, helped guide me via Twitter to a spot where I could grab coffee.

In the literature class I taught more poetry than I have ever taught in a single, non-survey course, as well as more drama (four plays, two by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and one each by Ed Bullins and Kia Corthron), a film, and rap music (three different artists, also a first), with a good helping of historical, critical and theoretical material. One of the most powerful moments for me was when I read the students' creative pieces (they wrote 6 short essays, a creative piece, and a final paper), and could see how fully nearly all of them had engaged with the course materials, in aesthetic, theoretical and personal terms. Their final papers represented an extension of this engagement.

The survey course was a huge challenge, as I had not taught such a large class in a few years, and I realized while planning it that I would need to create a narrative for the students to bring the disciplinarily disparate materials together. As an undergraduate I studied history in its various forms (including social history, which became my main approach), and into my historical narrative I tried to weave, to varying degrees of success, works of literature, sociology, political science, and journalism, to present the students with a way of understanding the rich and complex stories of African America from 1865 to the present. Based on the final exams, I think I succeeded, though I also know what to work on to improve the course, and my teaching of it, for future versions.

I want to note in particular how energizing it was to once again read Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, which I read as an undergraduate and only recalled in pieces, and W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, which impressed me no less this time than it had before. I had never finished LeRoi Jones's/Amiri Baraka's The Blues People, but did for this class, nor had I ever read beyond a few chapters in Nelson George's The Death of Rhythm and Blues, which together provide excellent overviews of Black music, and thus by extension, African American culture and society, from the mid-19th century through the end of the 20th. Their narratives provided a second scaffolding for us to follow as we proceeded chronologically from the Emancipation period to the election of Barack Obama. To teach this class in the year marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington (both of which we talked about) was also energizing.

I also have even deeper appreciation for the work of so many former colleagues, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Darlene Clark Hine, and Aldon Morris, whose work I taught and from which I, like the students, learned a great deal. Among the exciting moments for me was when I had the chance to discuss with the class Robin Kelley's exploration of working-class and poor African Americans' day-to-day battles in the mid-to-late 1940s, the innumerable acts of resistance, self-protection and self-assertion that constituted "small war zones," in public transportation in Birmingham, Montgomery and other Southern cities, that helped prepared the ground for the Civil Rights movement struggles and victories that would soon come there and elsewhere. The poet and scholar Geoffrey Jacques has noted more than once how badly we in the US could benefit from a careful and thorough study of the history of African Americans, and this course underlined how important and pressing Geoffrey's suggestion continues to be. Most of us--including African Americans--still don't know enough, beyond some significant historical facts and anecdotes, about our past, and how much that past continues to inform our contemporary--which is to say, American, and global--experience.

These courses unfolded as Rutgers itself has faced a significant institutional crisis, which began before I started last fall and which continues to unfold as I type this blog post. In both classes I was able to note how significant the social, political and cultural activism we were studying had proved in the past fortunes of our campus; in 1969, black students occupied Conklin Hall for a week, thus provoking changes that helped to create the vibrant, racially, ethnically, economically, and culturally diverse campus--the most diverse campus in the United States--Rutgers-Newark is today. I also was able to point out to them that one of the sources of the university's current crisis, the forced integration of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) into Rutgers as the "new" medical school, had an antecedent in the state's rezoning and forced clearance, using eminent domain, of an African American Newark neighborhood in 1967, in order to build a new campus for UMDNJ, and which led to the 1967 Newark Uprising, that profoundly scarred and changed the city. How fitting that these earlier history has been all but buried in the discussions about Rutgers's transformation, but how powerfully it resonates in the threats Rutgers-Newark (and Rutgers-Camden) and the university as a whole face as the changes unfold. I tried my best to let the students know that they could and must be agents of change, as their predecessors were.

I must add that at this point over the last 10 years (with the exception of 2006, when I had a spring leave yet nevertheless had university business to address) I would still be in class, in the final weeks of the spring quarter, so I continue to feel a bit unsettled, as if I am leaving classes full of students hanging in the lurch. I remind myself: the grades are in! It feels good to be done before the end of May, and I imagine that by next year this time, I will feel as if an earlier start to the summer is the way things have always been. Once again, congratulations to all the 2013 graduates!

Remembering Richard Iton

Richard Iton

Last week I sadly learned of the death, after the recurrence of a previous illness, of my former Northwestern University colleague Richard Iton. Like all of the full-time members in Northwestern's African American Studies Department, Richard was a distinguished scholar in several fields, and he brought this interdisciplinarity to bear in his scholarly and critical work, and in his teaching. A political scientist by training, with a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, he explored the relationship between black popular culture and political and social movements and formations. The author of two award-winning books, including In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), his interests encompassed a wide range of topics, such as the Black Diaspora and transnationality, postcolonial studies, and critical race studies. Richard could and did speak as authoritatively about Hegel, Gramsci and Fanon as about the history of African American comedy or hip hop, and he once thrilled students by giving them a short course, in the span of a few hours, on hip hop's history and aesthetic and cultural stages up to today. He also played a key role in designing and implementing Northwestern's very rigorous and highly regarded doctoral program in African American Studies, one of the leading ones in the US, and it was not only his intellectual vision, but his diligent administrative work that, alongside that of others, brought the NU PhD in African Americans to fruition. His passing represents a great loss to the department, the university, and the fields in which he worked. It also represents the loss of a warm, generous, down-to-earth, funny, brilliant person, someone who succeeded, many times over, in bringing talented new scholars into the world. Rest in peace, Richard, and we will truly miss you, your exceptional and focused mind, your generous, amazing spirit.

The official statement from Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the chair of African American Studies at Northwestern:

Mourning the passing of our Dear Colleague, Richard Iton

April 25, 2013 -- Last night, we received reports of the passing of our colleague, teacher, and friend Richard Iton. We have been working to confirm this information, and we just received word from Northwestern Memorial Hospital that these reports are unfortunately true. Our hearts are broken and our minds are jarred. But we can take comfort in the fact that Richard touched many lives and made remarkable contributions to our department, our university, and our discipline. We will share details about services when we receive them from Richard's family. In the meantime, let's lean on each other for support.

Yours in sympathy,
Celeste Watkins-Hayes, PhD
Chair, Dept. of African American Studies

Here is a video of Richard speaking last year at Cornell University:

A New School, A New School Year

Call slips at the NYPL

This past two month's post-move's worth of scurrying about searching for books and films at local libraries and bookstores, speed-reading, photocopying and scanning, writing and rewriting and re-rewriting syllabi has come to fruition in the form of my first week, and first undergraduate and graduate classes at my new employer. I'll say more about my classes soon, but I'll note that I am teaching two this fall: one in African American and African Studies, focusing on Afro-Latin literature, and the second a graduate course in English, under the rubric of postmodernism, which explores transhumanism and posthumanism. (I thank my former Northwestern colleague Alex Weheliye for turning me on to Sylvia Wynter and getting me to think more carefully about the latter two concepts.)  The first class yesterday went very well, and I am charged up for the first course meeting of the grad course tonight. (UPDATE: It went very well too.) I'll write more soon, but to all who have returned or are returning the classroom over these next few weeks, as teachers or students or both, at all levels, BEST WISHES FOR A GREAT SCHOOL YEAR!

Book Reviews in Drunken Boat + The Chronicle Attack on Black Studies Grad Students

I often forget to post little things I've done or have been up to, but: the online (and print) journal Drunken Boat has published my review of two delightful books, Jorge Carrera Andrade's Micrograms (Wave Books, 2011), and Rosmarie Waldrop's Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010). The reviews editor, poet Shira Dentz,  also asked last fall for five books I'm reading, so I imagine that'll post at some point soon. I'll just add that that I had no idea how important Carrera Andrade was to the history of 20th century Latin American letters, but it turns out he's a big deal, and Micrograms, translated by Alejandro Acosta and Joshua Beckman, is a superb introduction to his work.

+++

For a variety of reasons, not least because I am an affiliate faculty member of Northwestern University's extraordinary African American Studies Department and feel so close to its faculty and students I almost could not compose a calm response, I have held back on commenting on the vicious, ignorant, racist attack, in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the dissertations of brilliant graduate students Ruth Hays, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and LaTasha Levy. Nevertheless a number of friends contacted me and pressed me to respond. As is widely known now, the attack followed a glowing piece, "Black Studies: Swaggering Into the Future," by Stacy Patton, which coincided with a conference, "A Beautiful Struggle: Transforming Black Studies in Shifting Political Landscapes--A Summit of Doctoral Programs," held at Northwestern on April 12-14, 2012, sponsored by Northwestern's African American Studies Department in conjunction with the Northwestern Graduate School. The packed conference brought together faculty, students and staff from the small number of American universities that offer Ph.D.-level studies in African American and African/Africana/Black Studies.

The conference was superlative, and brought people from all over the US. As my former dean, the distinguished sociologist Aldon Morris, told me with elation filling his smile, the Chronicle had positively written up  and even used the word "swagger" to describe African American Studies, underling what many across academe acknowledged, that it was now a mature and vibrant field. It is. Then came the hatchet job, NOT on faculty members--that would not be unexpected--but on vulnerable GRADUATE STUDENTS, and not only did the hack show utter disdain for the entire field, but she mocked these students' work without ever reading a single page of their dissertations, of any papers they'd written, of anything by them. She not only knew nothing about them or their work, but made clear that she didn't care to.

Many people have responded with eloquence to this attack, not least among them these students, who are so smart and impressive I cannot but praise them. But one thing I also noticed that was a few people who supported these students and Black Studies chose, in response, to pick other fields to ridicule. A prominent black blogger and pundit whose work I greatly admire decided to start signifying on Twitter about medieval studies. I responded to him, but I had earlier responded to friends who, in a private email, questioned whether there weren't works in other fields that could not be denounced as obscure, and so forth. In response I wrote the following, which I have adapted slightly to remove the names of the people I was responding to, but I think it expresses my thoughts about both the racist hack, and the larger game she was engaging in, which I wish people would try to keep in mind. It's not just about Black Studies, or these wonderful graduate students, who to this lazy, hateful hack were ready targets.

My note:

Yes to everything you, ___, and you, ___, and everyone who has spoken on behalf of Ruth, Keeanga-Yahmatta and LaTasha, and Black Studies (and Ethnic and Women's and Gender and Queer Studies), have said. This is a battle both inside and outside academe, it's ongoing and we're hardly post-ANYTHING, racism and white supremacy rear their heads daily, and people like Naomi Schaefer Riley, in their gross ignorance, do speak for many, but we can never let them have the last word.

One of the things we should always consider is the larger political economy in which such hateful rhetoric emerges, how it aims to shape the public and private discourse, how its insidiousness feeds into long-standing and continuing discourses that then erupt as political agendas and platforms, and public policies, that are always incredibly and disparately harmful to people of color, especially Black people; to women; to sexual and religious minorities and dissidents; to working-class and poor people; and so forth.

For every Naomi Schaefer Riley spewing this crap, there are hundreds of people working very hard to enact the empty beliefs and values, if they can be called that, behind what she's saying. And these enactors work in multiple ways, often in seemingly benign ones. So we should stand with these three brilliant graduate students and with everyone working in Black Studies and similar fields, but we should also not lose sight of the larger picture, which is that we are still in a pitched battle, and it's not about to end anytime soon, no matter how much many people want to hoodwink or lull us into thinking it will.

As colleagues across the country will attest, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, at all levels, but especially at public institutions, are under attack. Attacking graduate students in African American Studies was a no-brainer for this person, and the Chronicle knew exactly what they were doing (yes, the journal fired the hack and its editor issued an the apology for the hack's journalistic malfeasance) in allowing her to hack away. But we should all always keep in mind that similar attacks have been launched against ethnic studies in general and in specific (cf. the ban on Latino/a Studies in Arizona), on women's studies, on gender studies, on LBGBQ/queer studies (think of all the snark about queer studies papers at past MLA conferences, etc.), but alsothe most traditional fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the arts.

The vital work that humanities scholars and social scientists do, alongside that of artists of all kinds, is vital for the production of human knowledge and the survival of human societies. There are many out there who have little desire for this vital work to continue; they know that the more ignorant most people are, the great the power they, the powerful, can wield.  The hack who penned that Chronicle attack is on the payroll of these folks; we shouldn't ever forget that, or the danger that they pose. It's not about to disappear anytime soon.

Manning Marable (1950-2011)

It saddened me tremendously to learn of Manning Marable's (1950-2011, Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) passing this past weekend from pneumonia after many years of battling sarcoidosis.  Marable had not long ago completed his magnum opus, his huge, deeply researched and richly revelatory biography (including, it has been reported, an outing) of Malcolm X (1925-1965), one of African-America's iconic figures.  The 600-page biography is slated to appear on store shelves tomorrow. I am planning to dive into the Malcolm X biography, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, as soon as I can, so I'll write more about that later, but I did want to point out that Marable was not just a major scholar--he taught history most recently at Columbia University, where he founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and where I met him in person at a conference in the late 1990s--but a lifelong Left activist and Black culture worker, who figured out a way to make this multi-pronged approach to life, scholarship, and political engagement work. Among his many achievements, in addition to teaching at the Cornell University, Fisk University, Colgate University, University of Colorado-Boulder and Ohio State University, he founded the journal Souls; served as chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS); served on the Advisory Board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Board of Directors for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN); was active in the 1970s in the New Democratic Movement; and wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited over 20 books, including the one that almost immediately made him famous, 1983's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983).

I can attest to the fact that this is a book people who probably have picked up few books of history (outside of school) over the last 30 years actually read, and discussed; I can recall being a 20-something in Cambridge and Boston, and hanging out with politically savvy, cult-nat types, and Marable's arguments were as fluent on their tongues as Marx's or anyone else's. Marable, to the little extent I knew him, was the kind of person who could easily and would have joined us, and chatted and listened to us, schooled us, without ever being pedantic or talking down. Even publishing with Boston's progressive South End Press was a noteworthy step.  Though he didn't know me from the wallpaper at the Columbia conference, he was pleasant, generous, funny, and encouraging, the very model of what I imagined and still hope the best professors would be like. And, I should add, he was not, at least in my experience, homophobic either. With his wife, anthropologist Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood, he published the beautiful volume Freedom: A Photographic Portrait of the African American Struggle (Phaidon, 2002), which offers not only indelible imagery from the long Black American struggle for freedom, but also the editorial expertise of leading scholars. The work represented something I wish more of the best scholars, especially those of color, would aim for: producing works that might allow non-academics to enjoy the fruits of their hard work and brilliance.

One of the things I most admired about him was his willingness to speak out. We don't have a media system that gives voices like his much hearing, but that never stopped him, nor did careerism or fear or indifference or the many other things that do curb people, however necessary--people have to live--these limitations are.  His passing is a great loss for Dr. Mullings and his family, for the history and African-American Studies professions, for African American scholars and thinkers, for politically engaged people on the Left, for Columbia University and his colleagues and students, and for the United States.  My deepest condolences to his family, and please, go buy his biography of Malcolm X if you can afford it.