In This New Hour: Memory’s Insistence in Black Study

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About the Guest Editors

Jarvis R. Givens is an assistant professor of education and an affiliate faculty in the department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Givens earned his PhD in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently completing his first book entitled, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Dr. Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He is the author of three books of poetry and prose: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was the winner of the 2019 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He earned his PhD in English from Princeton University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Notes

1 Zora Neale Hurston, “Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 11, 1945,” June 11, 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

2 Hortense J. Spillers, “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (Dissertation, Brandeis University, 1974), 312.

3 "Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization." Internationalist 360°, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIC STUDIES (blog), June 6, 2016, https://revolutionarystrategicstudies.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/capitalism-marxism-and-the-black-radical-tradition-an-interview-with-cedric-robinson/; Robinson makes a similar claim about black radicalism: Cedric J. Robinson and Robin D. G. Kelley, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 73.

4 Quote taken from Hortense J. Spillers “A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object,” included in this issue.

5 See article 4 section “d” of ANA constitution: American Negro Academy. The American Negro Academy organizational constitution, ca. 1900. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

6 Keith D. Leonard, “First Questions: The Mission of Africana Studies: An Interview with Hortense Spillers,” Callaloo 30, no. 4 (2007): 1054–68.