Robin D. G. Kelley: Revisiting Black Marxism in the Wake of Black Lives Matter

Robin D.G. Kelley - Mike Brown's Body: A Meditation on War, Race, & Democracy

Cedric J. Robinson: the Making of a Black Radical Intellectual

Cedric Robinson

Robin D.G.Kelley, Counter Punch

Just as Thucydides believed that historical consciousness of a people in crisis provided the possibility of more virtuous action, more informed and rational choices, so do I.

 –Cedric J. Robinson, 1999

On Sunday, June 5, we lost an intellectual giant. Cedric Robinson was a wholly original thinker whose five books and dozens of essays challenged liberal and Marxist theories of political change, exposed the racial character of capitalism, unearthed a Black Radical Tradition and examined its social, political, cultural, and intellectual bases, interrogated the role of theater and film in forming ideologies of race and class, and overturned standard historical interpretations of the last millennia. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said, Robinson was that rare polymath capable of seeing the whole—its genesis as well as its possible future. No discipline could contain him. No geography or era was beyond his reach. He was equally adept at discussing Ancient Greece, England’s Middle Ages, plantations in Cyprus or South Carolina, anticolonial rebellions in Africa or Asia, as well as contemporary politics of Iran and Vietnam, El Salvador and the Philippines. No thinker—not Hegel, not Hannah Arendt, not even Frantz Fanon—was above criticism. We can seed why academia basically ignored his writings until recently: he threw down the gauntlet before the alter of “Social Sciences,” and challenged Black Studies to embrace its radical mission, which he once described as “a critique of Western Civilization.”

Black Study, Black Struggle

Robin D.G. Kelley, The Boston Review

In the fall of 2015, college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This is not to say that college students had until then been quiet in the face of police violence against black Americans. Throughout the previous year, it had often been college students who hit the streets, blocked traffic, occupied the halls of justice and malls of America, disrupted political campaign rallies, and risked arrest to protest the torture and suffocation of Eric Garner, the abuse and death of Sandra Bland, the executions of Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott, Tony Robinson, Freddie Gray, ad infinitum.

That the fire this time spread from the town to the campus is consistent with historical patterns. The campus revolts of the 1960s, for example, followed the Harlem and Watts rebellions, the freedom movement in the South, and the rise of militant organizations in the cities. But the size, speed, intensity, and character of recent student uprisings caught much of the country off guard. Protests against campus racism and the ethics of universities’ financial entanglements erupted on nearly ninety campuses, including Brandeis, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Amherst, UCLA, Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of North Carolina, both Chapel Hill and Greensboro. These demonstrations were led largely by black students, as well as coalitions made up of students of color, queer folks, undocumented immigrants, and allied whites.

Africa Speaks, America Answers

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Robin D.G. Kelley and Angela Davis: Freedom Dreams, Freedom Now!

Robin Kelley: "The Long Rise and Short Decline of American Democracy"

Robin D.G. Kelley on 'Thelonious Monk: The life and Times of an American Legend'

Robin Kelley Remembers Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism: A Poetics of Anticolonialism

This essay is an introduction to Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. The full text of Discourse on Colonialism is online here.

A Poetics of Anticolonialism

by Robin D.G. Kelley, Monthly Review, 1999

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism might be best described as a declaration of war. I would almost call it a “third world manifesto,” but hesitate because it is primarily a polemic against the old order bereft of the kind of propositions and proposals that generally accompany manifestos. Yet, Discourse speaks in revolutionary cadences, capturing the spirit of its age just as Marx and Engels did 102 years earlier in their little manifesto.