Thought, Culture, and Politics in Black Women’s History

Women in Africa and its diaspora have always produced knowledge across time and in various contexts, both as organic intellectuals and as those formally tied to knowledge industries such as the academy. Codifying a black women’s intellectual history field, though, has ramifications for all disciplines: an over-representation of black women as “doers” without sufficient consideration of their history of ideas leaves allied fields insufficiently conceived and entire disciplines underdeveloped.

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women includes fifteen scholarly essays assembled to situate black women’s experiences within a history of ideas generally. The editors foreground the generative influence of grand historical experiences such as slavery, colonization, and segregation. When black women have produced knowledge, what has been the content and the process? According to the editors, the result is an “intellectual history ‘black-woman-style,’ an approach that understands ideas as necessarily produced in dialogue with lived experience and always inflected by the social facts of race, class, and gender” (p. 4).

An avowed turn toward black women’s intellectual history is at once old and new. In discrete places, scholars have long examined the history of black women’s ideas, especially in literary criticism, and have noted the intellectual and political value of doing so.¹ The editors here make no false or exaggerated claim to originality in this sense. Their target is a disciplined and coherent recognition of the “modestly documented” world of black women’s “intellectual labors” throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean (p. 3). In pursuing this goal, they aim to bring “new visibility” to the relatively neglected world of black women’s knowledge production and, as others have done, expose “the fragile and sometimes false nature of analytic categories,” particularly the binaries of place: public and private, academic and non-academic (p. 5).

As with other anthologies compiled by multiple editors, the result is mixed: some essays make a more direct connection to the volume’s clearly stated aims while others are less successful. The standout essays raise critical questions and present superb examples of how to produce black women’s intellectual history.

In her marvelous essay, “Phillis Wheatley, a Public Intellectual,” Arlette Frund unfurls the life and work of the captive slave and internationally renowned author in ways that take us well beyond Wheatley as an icon re-discovered in the twentieth century. Placing her in the proper political and intellectual context of the eighteenth century, Frund deftly explores Wheatley’s complex subjectivity and analyzes in clear, precise language the impressive political reasoning that Wheatley used to challenge preeminent Enlightenment thinkers of her day, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Her poems and letters circulated widely, and their contents ranged from musings on everyday life to reflections on death and loss to incisive analyses of profound political questions. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and of Edward Said’s conception of intellectuals, Frund maintains that Wheatley was unquestionably a public intellectual (p. 50). Wheatley’s work challenged state authority by insisting on notions of egalitarianism and liberty that were expansive and humanitarian in aim and scope. She reflected critically on capture, slavery, and separation while condemning slave owners’ hypocrisy. In the truest sense, Wheatley was, in Frund’s words, an Atlantic World philosophe, a “founding figure and premiere practitioner of an intellectual history of black women” (p. 50). Frund’s essay is a useful model for black women’s intellectual history.

Among other outstanding essays in...