Ideas in Unexpected Places : Reimagining Black Intellectual History

This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history.
 
The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.
 
Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.

BRANDON R. BYRD is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti.
 
LESLIE M. ALEXANDER is an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861; and Fear of a Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Birth of Black Internationalism. She is also coeditor of We Shall Independent Be: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States and the Encyclopedia of African American History. Alexander is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship.

RUSSELL RICKFORD is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and the author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination.