African American Intellectual History Society

👉🏾 Discover how music has long served as a powerful language of identity, memory, and resistance across the African diaspora.

In "Rhythms of Resistance in Afro-Latino Identity, Music, and Culture," Kayla Becknuss (Baylor University) explores the rich cultural and political significance of Afro-Latino musical traditions and the ways they have shaped struggles for freedom, belonging, and self-definition across generations.

Rhythms of Resistance in Afro-Latino Identity, Music, and Culture The opening beats from the bombas de pellejo at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show came from an instrument brought over by enslaved Africans to Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny then displays a sugar plantation, signaling to the enslaved people who helped build what Puerto Rico is today and the island’s ...

Today on Black Perspectives, Russell Crosthwait (Baylor University) explores the Black intellectual traditions that shaped Frederick Douglass—and argues that Douglass's greatest rhetorical lessons emerged not simply from books, but from the intellectual and spiritual worlds created by enslaved communities.

"What Douglass argued is a different question from how he argued it. Where did he learn to time a silence, work a pronoun, and drop a Bible verse on a crowd that did not see it coming? Not in any library in New York. He learned it earlier—on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and in the streets of Baltimore among people whose names the country does not remember."

Read the essay: https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-intellectual-traditions-that-shaped-frederick-douglass/

The Black Intellectual Traditions That Shaped Frederick Douglass The United States recently marked 250 years since the adoption of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. For this occasion, a quote has been circulating from Frederick Douglass: "This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." Most Americans will hear it as proof that the Republi

📚Our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel.'s 'Bounds of Blackness' concludes with a response by the author. Click the link below to read Tounsel’s essay, "African Americans, , and the Politics of Solidarity."

"How, then, did African Americans articulate solidarity with an African context that did not experience the more legible type of exclusively white colonial domination experienced by most African nations? How, furthermore, did Black Americans practically learn about an African context beyond the register of race-based transatlantic slavery?"

Author's Response: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness. In April 2023, civil conflict erupted in Sudan between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). While numbers alone never convey a war’s human toll, the statistic

📚Our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s 'Bounds of Blackness' continues with an essay by the distinguished historian Brenda Gayle Plummer. Follow the link below to read "Exceeding the Bounds of the Black International."

"Tounsel’s intervention puts Black Americans in conversation not only with the Sudan but also with the Middle East and the Arab world more broadly."

Exceeding the Bounds of the Black International | AAIHS This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel's Bounds of Blackness. Stop the War in Sudan Protest in 2023. London, UK (Loredana Sa ...

📚Our roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s 'Bounds of Blackness' continues with an essay by historian Michell Chresfield. Follow the link below to read "Race-Making Across Borders: How Sudan Challenges the Study of Race"

"By illuminating their competing visions of Sudan, Tounsel invites us to consider how African Americans’ racialization of Sudan reshaped how they understood their own Blackness."

Race-Making Across Borders: How Sudan Challenges the Study of Race | AAIHS This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness. A protestor holds a placard during the March for Sudan in London (L ...

Our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s 'Bounds of Blackness' continues today with an essay by Kimberly D. Hill. Please follow the link below to read "The Meanings and Significance of Black Internationalism."

"The rhetoric about connections between people of African descent in the United States and Sudan also reveals varying definitions of Blackness and racial solidarity."

https://www.aaihs.org/the-meanings-and-significance-of-black-internationalism/

🌟This week we're featuring an online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s 'Bounds of Blackness.' Check out the first essay by historian Nemata Blyden on "The Complex Relationship Between African Americans and Sudan."

"The book explores African American engagement with post-independence Sudan, highlighting how different groups of African American women and men came to understand the country and its people as well as their relationship to this sometimes-unfamiliar nation and its inhabitants."

The Complex Relationship Between African Americans and Sudan | AAIHS This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness. Rally in Washington, DC, occurring on April 30, 2006 (runningtwig / ...

🌟 The 2027 AAIHS Planning Committee invites individual and panel proposals for short presentations that explore how African-descended peoples across time and space have confronted dehumanizing systems by imagining and creating alternative possibilities for being in the world.

https://www.aaihs.org/call-for-papers-aaihs-2027-conference/

We are inviting early-career scholars and ABD graduate students to participate in a two-day workshop at Brown University in October 2026 focused on the Global Black Press.

The workshop will bring together emerging scholars to share and discuss draft essays for a collaborative scholarly project commemorating the bicentennial of the Black Press (1827–2027).

Organized in partnership with the African American Intellectual History Society, its digital platform Black Perspectives and the journal, Global Black Thought, the initiative examines the enduring and evolving role of Black journalism in shaping Black intellectual, cultural, and political life across the African diaspora.

https://www.aaihs.org/black-journalism-in-global-perspective-intellectual-exchange-across-the-diaspora/

📚Our roundtable on Kali Nicole Gross’s latest book concludes with her response. Follow the link below to read more.
“Vengeance feminism, at its core, is a counterpunch—a way for Black women to lash back and take revenge to escape total victimization.”

https://www.aaihs.org/authors-response-the-power-of-black-womens-fury/