Posted on 23 June 2019
Justin E.H. Smith joins us to discuss Anton Wilhelm Amo against the background of ideas about race in early modern philosophy, including Leibniz.
0 commentsPosted on 7 July 2019
Eighteenth century black authors touch on philosophical themes in autobiographical narratives, poetry, and other literary genres.
0 commentsPosted on 21 July 2019
Phillis Wheatley astonishes colonial Americans with her exquisite and precocious poetry and reflects on the liberating power of the imagination.
4 commentsPosted on 1 September 2019
Preacher and Revolutionary War soldier Lemuel Haynes argues that the principles of the American Revolution demand the abolition of slavery.
2 commentsPosted on 15 September 2019
Ignatius Sancho and Benjamin Banneker make their mark on the history of Africana thought through letters that reflect on the power of sentiment.
5 commentsPosted on 29 September 2019
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano advance the goals of the abolitionist movement through a groundbreaking political treatise and an influential autobiography.
8 commentsPosted on 13 October 2019
In an age of revolutions and revolutionary ideas, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 stands out as the most radical of them all.
2 commentsPosted on 27 October 2019
The Baron de Vastey unveils the horror of colonialism as a system and defends the monarchy of King Christophe in the tense early years of Haiti’s independence.
Note: this episode repeats some of Vastey's vivid descriptions of violence against slaves, so please think twice before listening to it around kids for example.
0 commentsPosted on 10 November 2019
An interview with Doris Garraway on the background, intellectual basis, and legacy of the Haitian Revolution.
2 commentsPosted on 24 November 2019
Building black institutions in early American history, with Prince Hall and the Masons in Boston, and Richard Allen and the Methodists in Philadelphia.
0 commentsPosted on 8 December 2019
Questions of political autonomy and group identity in the emigration movement led by Paul Cuffe, Daniel Coker, John Russwurm and others.
2 commentsPosted on 22 December 2019
An interview with James Sidbury about the emergence of a self-conscious African identity in the diaspora.
4 commentsPosted on 5 January 2020
David Walker defends violent resistance in his incendiary and influential Appeal.
3 commentsPosted on 19 January 2020
Maria W. Stewart’s public addresses bring the concerns of African American women into the struggle against racial prejudice.
0 commentsPosted on 2 February 2020
Hosea Easton’s Treatise provides an overlooked but fascinating theory of race and racism.
2 commentsPosted on 16 February 2020
Melvin Rogers joins us to discuss David Walker, Maria Stewart, and Hosea Easton.
0 commentsPosted on 1 March 2020
Frederick Douglass' journey from slave to leading figure of 19th century American thought.
0 commentsPosted on 12 April 2020
He is called a “father of black nationalism,” but Martin Delany also promoted integration in American society. Can the apparent tension be resolved?
0 commentsPosted on 10 May 2020
Mary Ann Shadd and Samuel Ringgold Ward reflect on what Canada can offer African Americans, differing on the problem of racism.
0 commentsPosted on 24 May 2020
From his time in Liberia to his later concentration on the reform of African American culture, Alexander Crummell identifies progressive “civilization” as a means of liberation.
4 commentsPosted on 7 June 2020
Wilson Moses speaks to us about his research into early black nationalism, with reference to Crummell, Douglass, and others.
2 commentsPosted on 21 June 2020
Africanus Horton looks toward a future of self-government for West Africa beyond slavery and colonialism.
0 commentsPosted on 5 July 2020
Edward Blyden gains appreciation for Islam in West Africa and gradually moves from political nationalism to cultural nationalism.
3 commentsPosted on 19 July 2020
T. Thomas Fortune uses newspaper editorials to put forth a theory of civil rights and sets out a plan of political action for protecting them.
4 commentsPosted on 6 September 2020
Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin debunks racist pseudo-science and argues that inequalities among humans are caused by social, not biological, factors.
0 commentsPosted on 20 September 2020
John Jacob Thomas argues for self-government in the English colonies of the Caribbean but his fellow Trinidadian Frederick Alexander Durham recommends repatriation to Africa instead.
0 commentsPosted on 4 October 2020
Abolitionists Luiz Gama and Joaquim Nabuco, and the great novelist Machado de Assis, react to the injustices of slaveholding in Brazil.
11 commentsPosted on 17 October 2020
Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, an unprecedented contribution to black feminist theory.
0 commentsPosted on 1 November 2020
Ida B. Wells, her tireless crusade against lynching, and her analysis of the underlying purpose of racial violence
0 commentsPosted on 15 November 2020
Brittney Cooper on activists connected to the National Association of Colored Women, including Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells.
2 commentsPosted on 29 November 2020
A late 19th-century churchman tries to explain how slavery fit into God’s plan and decide whether the future for African Americans lies in Africa or America.
1 commentsPosted on 13 December 2020
Was Booker T. Washington’s “accommodationist” approach to race relations a failure to stand up to injustice or a cunning strategy for incremental change?
0 commentsPosted on 27 December 2020
W.E.B. Du Bois emerges as a historian, sociologist, and innovative philosophical thinker in the 1890s, and introduces his famous idea of "double consciousness."
4 commentsPosted on 10 January 2021
Co-host Chike joins Peter to look back at series two and ahead to series three.
8 commentsPosted on 24 January 2021
By exploring the work and activities of W.E.B. Du Bois around the turn of the twentieth century, we introduce some of the themes of our coverage of that century.
3 commentsPosted on 7 February 2021
The ANA unites leading African American scholars of the early 20th century, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Ferris, Archibald Grimké, and Kelly Miller (pictured).
0 commentsPosted on 21 February 2021
We chat with Tommy Curry about African-American thought between the turn of the century and the Harlem Renaissance.
4 commentsPosted on 7 March 2021
West African intellectuals like J.E. Casely-Hayford (pictured) and Mojola Agbebi build upon Edward Blyden’s ideas at the dawn of the twentieth century.
2 commentsPosted on 21 March 2021
Around the time of World War One, Hubert Harrison (pictured), A. Philip Randolph, and other black socialists argue that racial oppression is caused by capitalism.
2 commentsPosted on 4 April 2021
Vanessa Wills speaks to us about Marx and his Africana legacy, with a special focus on black women Marxists.
0 commentsPosted on 18 April 2021
Marcus Garvey leads a powerful movement, inspires racial pride, and feuds with other thinkers like Du Bois.
0 commentsPosted on 2 May 2021
Marcus Garvey’s two wives, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey (pictured), establish themselves as activists in their own right and provide feminist voices within the Pan-African movement.
0 commentsPosted on 16 May 2021
An interview with Michael Dawson, who explains Marcus Garvey's black nationalism and how this and other political ideologies, like socialism and liberalism, have fared from the time of Garvey down to the present day.
1 commentsPosted on 30 May 2021
The artistic flowering of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance raises important questions about identity and the purpose of art.
0 commentsPosted on 25 July 2021
Pioneering historian Carter G. Woodson argues for a new approach to education and economic uplift.
0 commentsPosted on 5 September 2021
Zora Neale Hurston’s interest in Africana folklore feeds into her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
3 commentsPosted on 19 September 2021
The career of the multi-talented activist and performer Paul Robeson, and the place of the Negro spiritual in the Harlem Renaissance.
2 commentsPosted on 3 October 2021
Du Bois moves to the left, and revisits and refines older positions during the latter half of his very long life.
0 commentsPosted on 31 October 2021
Our first look at the emergence of the Negritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, with a focus on the early leadership of the Nardal sisters and Leon Damas.
0 commentsPosted on 14 November 2021
Leopold Senghor compares different ways of knowing while developing his theory of Negritude and combining the roles of poet and politician.
0 commentsPosted on 28 November 2021
Negritude thinkers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire embrace surrealism and reflect on the relationships between poetry, knowledge, and identity.
0 commentsPosted on 9 January 2022
Two Trinidadian political thinkers: sociologist Oliver Cox analyzes the nature of racial prejudice, and historian Eric Williams connects capitalism to slavery.
3 commentsPosted on 23 January 2022
Claudia Jones argues that Communism provides the remedy for racism and imperialism.
0 commentsPosted on 20 February 2022
Famous for his incendiary novel Native Son, Richard Wright responds in his multifaceted writings to sociology, communism, colonialism, and existentialism.
0 commentsPosted on 6 March 2022
Ralph Ellison provides a new metaphor for the experience of racism in his Invisible Man and tackles topics of art and identity in his essays.
2 commentsPosted on 3 April 2022
The story of Martin Luther King Jr. up to 1963, focusing on the development of his philosophy of nonviolence.
0 commentsPosted on 17 April 2022
An interview about the role of the emotions, including anger and feelings of dignity, in the non-violent protest campaign of King.
0 commentsPosted on 1 May 2022
The life and career of Malcolm X up to 1963, with a focus on his separatist black nationalism and his critique of non-violent protest.
3 commentsPosted on 15 May 2022
Chike joins Peter to look back at our coverage of Africana philosophy in the first half of the 20th century.
0 commentsPosted on 29 May 2022
After 1963, the views of Malcolm X and MLK came closer together, on topics including internationalism, political engagement, and economics.
2 commentsPosted on 12 June 2022
The Cuban activist and author Juan Rene Betancourt urges racial solidarity and reckons with the revolution under Castro and the island’s turn towards Communism.
3 commentsPosted on 24 July 2022
Frantz Fanon combines psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology to diagnose neuroses deriving from the colonial condition.
8 commentsPosted on 4 September 2022
Fanon’s incendiary final work explores the violent process of decolonization.
1 commentsPosted on 18 September 2022
We're joined by a leading Fanon expert to talk about a range of themes in his work: Negritude, psychiatry, and violence.
1 commentsPosted on 2 October 2022
The author of the famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, explores questions of violence, sexuality, and more during her too brief life.
0 commentsPosted on 16 October 2022
How the controversial slogan “black power,” used by activists like H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (pictured), relates to ideas of militancy, separatism, and the power of language.
0 commentsPosted on 30 October 2022
The philosophical underpinnings of a “vanguard of revolution” led by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver: the Black Panther Party.
3 commentsPosted on 13 November 2022
The Pan-Africanist philosopher Maulana Karenga defends the importance of cultural revolution and invents the holiday Kwanzaa.
0 commentsPosted on 11 December 2022
After Albert Cleage and James Cone propose a liberatory interpretation of Christianity, William R. Jones wonders whether God is a white racist. We also follow Black Theology among “Womanist” authors and in South Africa.
2 commentsPosted on 5 February 2023
The career and ideas of Nelson Mandela up to the time of his imprisonment, in the context of the founding of the African National Congress.
0 commentsPosted on 19 February 2023
Abdias do Nascimento, a leader in Brazilian theater and politics, and his theory of Quilombismo.
0 commentsPosted on 5 March 2023
Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic return to claim the pyramids, and Octavia Butler uses science fiction to confront the brutal past of slavery.
Thanks to Stephan Terre for the creation of the futuristic intro music!
3 commentsPosted on 19 March 2023
How the Rastafari movement grew from trends within Africana philosophy, and then passed into global popular culture in the music of Bob Marley and other reggae artists.
1 comments
Posted on 26 May 2019
An introduction to Africana philosophical thought as it emerged from the modern experience of slavery and colonization by Europeans.
10 comments