Anteriors and Interiors: The Black Intellectual Tradition as Spiritwork and Black Fightback

• In Event: Theorizing, Research, and Renewal Within the Black Intellectual Tradition: “How Do It Free Us?”

Abstract

“Sun Moon Child.
Speak to me Sun Moon Child.
I believe in your destiny.”

Imani Uzuri, 2007

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the emergence of “grounded intellectual work” (Kelley, 2016) committed to liberation activity in Black Diasporic educational, social, and sociocultural contexts. Our project reflects and reifies a protracted intellectual genealogy that aligns with recent scholarship exploring the multidimensionality of what Kambon (2003) described as the Afrikan Survival Thrust. Our submission presents contemporary research in Black education that is transformative, liberatory, and life-affirming. We interpret our work as 21st century Maroonage – a contemporized form of flight that serves three functional purposes: 1) ideological and psychocultural escape; 2) affirmative cultural return; 3) reinscription and renewal of purpose. This paper is a post-reflection that stems from protracted conversations among the co-editors of a special volume that was previously published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE).

Perspective
This submission reflects the guerilla intellectualism which Rodney (1990) proffered as a twofold understanding among Black scholars of 1) the power imbalance within academic spaces; and 2) their obligation to teach, write, and work within shared contexts of resistance, reclamation, and intellectual liberation for Africana peoples worldwide. In that context, we conceptualized this submission to speak to those committed to Black intellectual, cultural, and spiritual sovereignty. We have (as Du Bois did before us) entered the Veil in order to locate, apprehend, remember, re-member, and reinscribe what I call the lost-found sacred and sentient epistemologies (ex., histories, expressive forms, imaginaries, creative legacies, folklore, cultural lifeways) of Black folk. Our dialogue with and obligation to the Black Intellectual Tradition involves situating it as a site of memory, critical pedagogy, and cultural production.

Methods
We engaged in a duoethnographic methodology when writing about and centering the Black Intellectual Tradition. Norris, Sawyer, and Lund (2012) define duoethnography as a “collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world” (pg. 9) with several tenets that encourage researchers to “read the word and the world” through a dialogic – verbal and written – exchange.

Scholarly Significance
We situate the Black Intellectual Tradition as a living tradition which takes its conceptual inspiration from Malian philosopher Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901-1991). He regarded the experiences, spatialities, futurities, memories, and meanings of humans as living practice texts. We offer our special issue as a form of critical Black pedagogy to help us understand the symbiotic relationship between freedom and struggle; intellectualism and activism; art and politics; education and liberation; pedagogy and power; critique and praxis. This effort involves deep, qualitative exploration, interpretation, and renegotiation of memory and meaning that crystalizes at the nexus of education, activism, accountability, and Black thoughtworks.

Author

• Lasana D. Kazembe, Indiana University - Indianapolis