Black liberation struggle

by Angela Y. Davis

"Black liberation struggle" è una raccolta di scritti, realizzati da Angela Davis durante la detenzione, tra la fine degli anni '60 e gli inizi dei '70. Scritti sulle prigioni, i prigionieri politici e la repressione subita dai movimenti di liberazione dei neri negli Stati Uniti. Una testimonianza diretta dell'incrollabile impegno verso la causa del movimento afroamericano di Angela Davis. Saggi in cui la critica verso il sistema carcerario americano, cui l'autrice vorrebbe l'abolizione, diventa denuncia verso ogni forma di oppressione.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Politics, Philosophy, Cultural

125 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2019

About the author

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.

Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.

Reviews

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Philosophy is supposed to perform the task of generalizing aspects of experience, and not just for the sake of formulating generalizations, of discovering formulas as some of my colleagues in the discipline believe. My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think that Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d'etre of phil-osophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age "proper living" means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression." (14)

[avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Moreover, it is not just his individual condition that the slave rejects and thus his misery is not just a result of his individual un-freedom, his individual alienation. True consciousness is the rejection of the institution itself and everything which accompanies it."

[Élan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read this for my Ecological Crisis and Human Freedom class. This is the first work I have read of Angela Davis (as an Anthropology major this is embarrassing), and I am inspired to read so much more. She is brilliant - an evocative speaker on social justice, humanity, and feminism. It was wonderful to read these lectures.

[Kate Sokley]

**did not rate as it is not my place to rate lectures and opinion pieces**

[Clifford Onehundredd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Angela Davis is an amazing woman who did her research, in reading this pamphlet it enlightened me and added more clarity to the conscious reality of blacks in Western Society. She drew on historical references and in understanding true liberation is 'resistance' / 'rejection' of captivity-- mentally and in some cases physically-- we are that much closer to amplifying the word 'freedom'. Although this was written in 1969--in parallel to the lectures Angela gave during that time--this pamphlet still is helpful to today's black community or any person looking to grasp a better vision of real freedom.

[Jeremy Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Angela Davis' Lectures on Liberation is a series of lectures from her 1969 course at UCLA, "Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature." The lectures focus on the philosophical and historical analysis of oppression, resistance, and liberation, particularly within the context of Black literature and history.

Key themes include:

1. The paradox of freedom: While Western philosophy idealizes freedom, real-world institutions like slavery contradict these ideals.
2. The role of Black literature: It provides a deeper understanding of freedom by exposing the failure of theoretical formulations that ignore lived oppression.
3. Resistance as liberation: Davis emphasizes that freedom is not static but an active struggle, citing figures like Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner.
4. The hypocrisy of religion: She critiques how Christianity was used to justify slavery but also notes how some enslaved individuals reclaimed it as a source of resistance.
5. The dialectic of master and slave: Drawing from Hegel, she argues that the master is dependent on the slave for his power, and resistance can shift these dynamics.
6. Alienation: Enslaved people were treated as property, forced into a non-human existence, yet their resistance—both physical and intellectual—challenged this status.
7. Davis connects these historical and philosophical insights to contemporary struggles, arguing that the lessons of past resistance are essential for present-day liberation movements.

[raluca · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Is man free or is he not? Ought he be free or ought not he be free? The history of Black Literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom , its extent and limits, than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the history of Western society. Why? For a number of reasons. First of all, because Black Literature in this country and throughout the world projects the consciousness of a people who have been denied entrance into the real world of freedom. Black people have exposed, by their very existence, the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation."

[KrisLopez · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The slave, the black man, the chicano and oppressed whites are much more aware of alienation, perhaps not as a philosophical concept, but as a fact of their daily existence.”