Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon

James, Joy ; Kirloskar-Steinbach, Monika ; Kalmanson, Leah ; El-Bizri, Nader ; Madaio, James ; Morisato, Takeshi ; Mungwini, Pascah ; Pang-White, Ann A ; Perina, Mickaella ; Rivera, Omar ; Stewart, Georgina

ISBN 10: 1350368636 / ISBN 13: 9781350368637

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 9781350368637

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350368636
• ISBN 13: 9781350368637
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Angela Davis is iconic as an international figure but few recognize the educational, political and ideological contexts that formed the public persona. Excavating layers of networks, activists, academics, polemicists, and funders across the ideological spectrum, Joy James studies the paradigms and platforms that leveraged Angela Davis into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual.

Beginning in Alabama in 1944 with Davis's birthplace and ending in California in 1970 with a surrogate political family, James investigates context in order to better understand the agency and identity of Davis. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US: AntiBlack repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergrad and graduate schooling-all interconnect and play a part in Davis's rise in stature from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later.

Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James highlights of the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and shows how a triumphal figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples' victory.

About the Authors

Joy James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, USA. She is the editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998) and the author of several noted books and publications on feminism, critical race theory, political prisoners, and democratic politics.
and democratic politics. Her most recent books include New Bones Abolition (2023) and In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2023).

Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach is Professor of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands and the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Philosophies.

Leah Kalmanson is Associate Professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas, USA.

Nader El-Bizri is Professor of Civilization Studies & Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

James Madaio is Head of the Department of South Asia at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic, and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, UK.