Introduction: Black Female Intellectuals in Historical and Contemporary Context

Abstract

This special issue of Comparative American Studies, Black Female Intellectuals in Historical and Contemporary Context, developed as part of an AHRC-funded network project over the past three years. This issue draws together several new and innovative essays that add to the field of intellectual histories, importantly expanding on understandings of Black female intellectuals as a discrete and distinct cohort within the wider terms of both ‘Black intellectuals’ and ‘the intellectual’. Importantly, the collection fosters understandings of Black female intellectuals and their actions as both activism (doing) and thought (thinking). Since the earliest years of the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-16th century, women across the Black diaspora have been central to the development of intellectual communities. These have often been grounded in ideals of activism and resistance against racial stereotyping and reductive categories of thought. Yet, the history of the Black intellectual, as defined by previous scholars such as Wilson Moses (2004) and Manning Marable (1998), has presented a somewhat limited interpretation of who might count under this term. Understandings of the Black intellectual in the minds of a non-specialist audience has been largely shaped by previous scholarly understandings of the Black intellectual as typically gendered as male, contributing to regional or national public discourses of the United States, beginning from the early 20th century, through speeches, lectures, and essays. Some excellent scholarship has been published since the late 1980s critiquing this centring of the Black male, and reflecting on Black women’s participation in the intellectual communities of the Black Atlantic (see, e.g. Carby 1987; Peterson 1995; Taylor 2002; Waters and Conaway 2007; Davies 2008; Jones; Bay 2010; Zackodnik, 2011; Bay et al. 2015; Umoren 2018; Blain 2021, 2018; Brooks 2021). Scholars have also begun revisiting the term ‘intellectual’ and widening it out to include activities at a more local level so to include Black women within this conceptual framework (see, e.g. Higginbotham 1993; Dodson 2002; Waters and Conaway 2007; Fraser 2018; Fraser and Griffin 2020). This conceptual broadening of the term as regards what the intellectual does and where she does it from will form one of the central themes of this special issue.