What the Drums are Saying: The Unfinished Business of Critical Black Studies

• In Event: Black Vision for Black Politics

Abstract

As a living and lived synthesis of resistance and agency, Black Studies flows from the Black Power Movement and from protracted efforts of Black students asserting their right to interrogate and reinscribe their history, culture, agency, and ways of being in the world. Since its formal inception, critics and detractors have challenged Black Studies to justify its geography as it simultaneously sought to create and claim space. As deeply political field of inquiry, Black Studies is critically at odds with forces seeking to falsify its aims, universalize it into an unrecognizable (i.e., less threatening) caricature, or dissolve it altogether. Efforts to derail Black Studies have actually succeeded in amplifying it as a vital site of interrogation, disruption, and social transformation. Interrogating Walter Rodney’s concept of ‘guerilla intellectualism’, this paper situates Critical Black Studies as a sentient, inherited cultural dialogue and a natural extension of the global Black Freedom Struggle.

Author

• Lasana D. Kazembe, IUPUI