The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

Now Available: Black Code

Cover art by John Jennings

The Black Scholar is proud to announce the release of “Black Code,” by guest editors Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Johnson and Neal have assembled a collective of digital soothsayers working on the margins of Black Studies, Afrofuturism, radical media, and the digital humanities. Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as praxis and methodology, it waxes insurgent when the need arises. And in this moment, we are in need of Black digital insurgency, one attuned to racial scripts of the past even as it looks to future modes of Black thought and cultural production for inspiration. Barely scratching the surface, this issue welcomes new work and celebrates a Black digital fugitivity that has been present since the beginning of the internet. Our contributors include Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lauren Cramer, Alessandra Raengo, Tara L. Conley, Ashleigh Wade, Aleia Brown, Joshua Crutchfield, Megan Driscoll, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, and Joy James, with an introduction from Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, and cover art from John Jennings celebrating Octavia Butler’s iconic novel, Wild Seed.

For a limited time, download and read the introduction, “Wild Seed in the Machine,” and “Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community” by Aleia M. Brown & Joshua Crutchfield for free.

To receive both print and digital versions of this issue, subscribe to Volume 47. When you subscribe to Volume 47, you will also receive “After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa,” “Black Experimental Poetics,” and our final issue of 2017.

From the Archives: “It’s Time to Turn the Guns the Other Way”

“It is not enough to protest Nixon’s war in the manner of the conventional white liberal.”

With so much talk about new Civil Wars, Civil Rights rollbacks, and an openly racist administration hell-bent on outdoing its most immediate historical analogue–the Nixon administration–and with so much celebration of the renaissance of protest and radicalism in the face of an increasingly authoritarian status quo, it might be worth returning to that most immediate historical analogue for insight via its voices of resistance.  This piece from The Black Scholar‘s bottomless archives reminds us of a time arguably more dangerous than ours and about commitments equally dangerous when the state wars against its own people.  Free to download and read through April 2017.

“It’s Time to Turn the Guns the Other Way” (Nathan Hare, 1970)

From the Archives! Rebellion Reflections: Urban Revolt in Memory, Strategy, and Practice By Ashley M. Howard

*Each virtual issue collates some of the best writing from our archives, updated with new introductions written by prestigious scholars of black studies, and will be free to read and download for a limited time.*

While violence as protest has been a long-standing tradition of the disenfranchised, the 1960s urban rebellions firmly fixed these actions in the African American tactical toolbox. While an incident of police violence most frequently sparked these violent reactions, activists also registered their discontent with chronic unemployment, discrimination, and second-class citizenship.

Looking back, 1965 Watts, 1980 Miami, 1992 South Central, 2015 Baltimore and countless other cities share much in common: police violence as catalyst; in property violence by rebels who are socially aware but politically ineffective; and a pervasive discourse of equal opportunity coexisting with gross social and economic disparities. Scholars, activists, and the concerned public cannot be complacent, however. The response and utility of uprisings are markedly different in the twenty-first century. The militarization of the police, widespread use of social media, and a quasi-sympathetic and digitally connected public strain our capacity to employ and frame these events in productive ways.

The included articles represent a multitude of African American reflections on urban rebellions. Beginning with the second issue of The Black Scholar, contributors like Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) founder Max Stanford struggled with the meaning and future of armed militancy via the uprisings. Politicians such as Representative Ron Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and the first black mayor of a major city, Richard Hatcher, detail the impact of these events on their constituencies. Poet-activist Aaron Ammons and scholar Hortense Spillers contemplate the personal impact of the uprisings through creative writing while other scholars historicize the events, uncover the rise in police brutality and document urban inequities. Finally, scholar-activist Sundiata Cha-Jua details one community’s efforts to combat police brutality in the wake of fifteen-year-old Kiwane Carrington’s murder by local officers in Champaign, Illinois. Collectively and in the wake of current and imminent street struggles, these articles encourage us to revisit the uprisings in order to frame our past and inform our future.

Ashley M. Howard
Loyola University New Orleans

Articles are free to access until 30 April, 2017 and can be accessed here.