Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones: radical Black female subjectivity, mutual comradeship, and alternative epistemology

Abstract

This article examines the shared radical Black female subjectivity and practice of mutual comradeship that bind Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones. It argues that their interrelation provides Boyce Davies with unique insight into Jones’s manifold intellectual, theoretical, and political contributions and has allowed Jones to animate and shape Boyce Davies’s approach to preserving and interpreting her legacy. The conclusion considers the ways that Jones and Boyce Davies offer an alternative epistemology that is instructive for scholars who seek to learn from and continue their ethical and political approach to scholar-activism.

Keywords:

• Claudia Jones
• Carole Boyce Davies
• mutual comradeship
• radical Black female subjectivity
• diaspora

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Charisse Burden-Stelly

Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2021–2022 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago and, starting in Fall 2022, an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. A scholar of critical Black studies, political theory, and intellectual history, she is the co-author, with Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. Burden-Stelly’s book Black Scare/Red Scare will be published with University of Chicago Press in 2023. She is also the co-editor of two forthcoming edited collections: Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) with Jodi Dean and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) with Aaron Kamugisha. Her writings appear in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, Journal of Intersectionality, and the CLR James Journal. Her public scholarship can be found in venues such as Monthly Review, Boston Review, Black Perspectives, and Black Agenda Report.