By Bernard E. Harcourt We closed our last seminar, Revolution 2/13, on a provocative passage from the introduction to C.L.R. James’s book, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. James is reflecting there on the form that his book had taken. The… Continue Reading
By Adom Getachew After our discussion, I thought another way we might distinguish the academic and worldly philosopher was to think less about their different modes of engagement, but to consider when the university came to be a dominant space… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt Adom Getachew makes several key points in her intervention and essay. The first point concerns the distinctive writing and publishing practices of the worldly philosophers we are discussing at Revolution 2/13. For the most part and… Continue Reading
By Adom Getachew In our selected readings for this week, we have snapshots of the anticolonial movement in Ghana—what both James and Padmore call a revolution—from three different figures and at three different moments. We encounter Nkrumah just before he… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt At the height of the crisis in Ghana in 1965, Kwame Nkrumah published a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. A few months later, in February 1966, Nkrumah would be deposed in a violent… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt The man at the helm is the African intellectual. He succeeds—or independent Africa sinks… As in Russia after the 1917 revolution, it is the intellectuals who will lead the continent. — C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “On our own we don’t add up.” — Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete, 125. Biodun Jeyifo made three main arguments in his intervention at Revolution 1/13 and elaborated on them, brilliantly, drawing on… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt At the first session of Revolution 13/13, three questions emerged as central problematics for this year’s public seminar. I will specify them in as precise terms as possible to help guide our conversation over the coming… Continue Reading
By Biodun Jeyifo The Negro is the man who must sit at the back of the bus in Alabama – Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture” Let Negroes negrify themselves… Let them persist to the point of madness in what… Continue Reading
By Bernard E. Harcourt “The generalized abolition of the colonial system and the definitive and universal eradication of racism” — Final Resolutions, Closing Session, First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Paris, September 22, 1956.[1] Sixty-five years ago… Continue Reading