Salon Intro Post: Keisha Blain’s “Set the World on Fire”

  In Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, she gives a new temporality to Black Nationalism. In the period between the heyday of Garveyism and the Black Power, much of the Black Nationalist activism was the result of Black women.

Blain emphasizes the ways in which African American women communicated across national and international boundaries in this organizing.

Impressively, Blain uses a very diverse range of sources: some more traditional archival sources and government documents. Others, like cultural work including music and poetry make for a more nuanced understanding of Black Women’s activism.

` But by using such a a diverse array of sources, Blain was able to recast Black Nationalist women as intellectuals in their own right. Many of these women worked with, and were overshadowed by, male activists at the time. By using under-utilized sources, Blain’s work reframes their own intellectual contributions. One of the major strengths of the work is that though Blain does focus some of her analysis on elite Black women activists, particularly in the earlier chapters, she is able to focus much of her attention on the activism of working class women, people who are often overlooked as both activists and intellectuals.

I really loved this book and will write a more fully developed essay towards the end of our discussion! For now, I am going to post some discussion questions to get us thinking about Blain’s work. Please join in on the comments or on facebook and if you have the inclination, write a guest post of your own! Thanks for reading along with us.

1. How does Set the World on Fire challenge traditional conceptions of Black Nationalism, and even Black Power?
2. Where does Blain’s work fit within the canon of African American intellectual history? Does it challenge the boundaries?
3. Intellectual history is often (rightfully) considered a primarily white, male, sub-discipline. What can we take from Blain’s book in changing that?
4. Are there other books (or primary sources!) that might be of interest on related subjects?
5. What are the challenges, pitfalls, and strengths of piecing together an archive in the ways that Blain did her book?
6. How can Women’s Studies and feminist theory inform works of political and intellectual history? How does it work here?