Events

What does it mean to talk today about a black radical tradition?

 Arguably, the idea of a radical tradition has been an important part of modern black intellectual life, shaping the constructions and reconstructions of an ethical-political connection across the rupturing history of black dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement. Part of the attractiveness, no doubt, of the idea of a black radical tradition is the way in which it offers an idiom of belonging, a vantage from which to narrate a shared past, and a perspective from which to imagine a common future. In recent years, however, in a growing number of books, we have seen the idea employed with more coherent force, perhaps more systematic intent.

This conference seeks to offer a critical platform on which to clarify the conceptual and political range of this idea of a black radical tradition. Needless to say, there is no interest in producing some kind of unifying coherence around this idea. We are, however, interested