Editor's Note
This is my belated conclusion to our wonderful salon on Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire.
Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire is an amazing achievement, and not just in the histories she has revealed but in the ways in which her book asks us to think critically about what it is to do intellectual history. In her interview with me, Blain discussed the criticism she often faced: that her subjects were “activists” not intellectuals. More and more I’ve realized that this is something commonly thrown at historians and others writing about intellectuals in non-institutionalized places-people working in activists organizations, in schools, in prisons, and really anywhere that is not traditional academic space.
The claim that someone may be “just” an activist doesn’t simply undermine the intellectual work of people in non-traditional spaces, but also discounts the work of activists. Can’t an activist be an intellectual? Isn’t activist work intellectual? And at what point can we separate the activist from the intellectual, or is the distinction meaningless?
Blain shows, that without a doubt, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Ethel Waddell, Celia Jane Allen, Ethel Collins, Amy Jacques Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Maymie Leona and Turpeau De Mena were all intellectuals. But why is it so difficult for many intellectual historians to grapple with intellectual work outside of the academy or traditional literary spaces? Is it because they believe this work only happens in the academy? Is it a failure to engage with the oppressive history of education?
I’ve been told, at least a dozen times, that I don’t write about intellectuals I write about activists. That just because the incarcerated people I write about write books, attend conferences, go on speaking tours, read critically from marxist and black radical traditions, and taught others, does not mean that they are intellectuals? It seems that the term intellectual itself is premised on exclusion. But Blain shows us that there are intellectuals everywhere, if we know how and where to look.
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I think, Holly, you’ve captured a central tension in how American intellectual history has developed in the last twenty years. Who we consider to be an intellectual is as important as how our subjects show off their “intellectual” credentials.
Certainly, many activists have throughout history come to their activism–or, at the least, tried to understand what pushed them into activism–by reading widely. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrestling with Marx, Niebuhr, and others; the Black Panthers considering reading widely theory and history as part of their activist training; freedom schools in the Deep South; and so much more. What Keisha Blain did with her work was really push me, and numerous other readers, to rethink that relationship between being an activist and being an intellectual.