New Black Intellectual Histories

Like many African Americanists,” the Vanderbilt University historian Brandon Byrd says, “I consider myself a generalist. It wasn’t till the past five years or so, when I joined the African American Intellectual History Society, that I really started to think about what this thing we’re calling African American intellectual history could be.” Recently, Byrd, the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), published “The Rise of African American Intellectual History” in the journal Modern Intellectual History. The article offers a rich overview of a field Byrd says has been “marginalized for too long.”

African American intellectual history, in Byrd’s view, crystallizes and clarifies some of the constitutive problems of history-writing: the tension between literate elites and unlettered masses as sources and subjects of history; the inevitable emotional investments of the scholar vis-à-vis his or her material; the inextricability of advocacy and historiography; the limitations of the archive.

I talked with Byrd about the relationship between intellectual history and social history, the neglected African American historian Earl Thorpe, the question of neutrality in historiography, and the global protests over police killings of African Americans.

“African American intellectual history,” you write, “is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods.” How does it differ from, or overlap with, American intellectual history as such?

Generally speaking, African American intellectual history as an enterprise is less interested in saying, This is what U.S. intellectual history does, this is what European intellectual history does, and this is what we do instead. Even doing that holds those other things up as the standard, right?

As normative.

Yes. One of the things that strikes me most about African American intellectual history — and this is true also of African intellectual history or Caribbean intellectual history or Indigenous intellectual histories — is that these histories are produced from the margins — both the margins of “history” and the margins of historiography. So these projects and the organizations that facilitate them are necessarily innovative. Many scholars doing African American intellectual history are dealing with enslaved populations, or folks after the period of enslavement who are Jim Crowed and excluded from forms of literacy — which is what has traditionally been defined as the act of the intellectual. But if “thinking” doesn’t necessarily look like the written word, and certainly not like the grand magnum opus, then what does thinking look like? There’s a necessary creativity in meeting these actors — who were certainly thinkers — on their own terms.