Contributions by:

Joy James

Ringing bell hooks: A Brilliant Feminist Calling for Liberation

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Spirituality Calls bell hooks sought the transcendent. She was and remains a spiritualist, perhaps more so than a “Black feminist.” At the September 24, 2022, Philadelphia “Inaugural Bell Hooks Symposium” keynote panel, prominent Black feminists asserted that hooks’ critique of “heteropatriarchy” was her greatest contribution. In an interview, philosopher George Yancy asks bell hooks to explain…

Marcuse’s Most Famous Student: Angela Davis on Critical Theory and German Idealism*

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*This article is adapted from a chapter in Joy James’s new book, Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of Icon. We thank Bloomsbury Press for permission to publish this excerpt. Angela Davis’s interactions with the famous philosopher of critical theory, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), shaped not only her university studies but stages within her intellectual and…

The Algorithm of AntiRacism

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Hegemonic Algorithms An algorithm can be as simple as a brownie or kombucha recipe. As a list of instructions it permits the completion of a task. Yet, what if the task—social justice—requires rewriting the algorithms we have inherited in our struggles against US racism?   In its June 19, 2020, “CALLING ON FACEBOOK CORPORATE ADVERTISERS TO PAUSE…