Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon

by Joy James, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach (Series Editor), Leah Kalmanson (Series Editor)

Angela Davis is iconic as an international figure but few recognize the educational, political and ideological contexts that formed the public persona. Excavating layers of networks, activists, academics, polemicists, and funders across the ideological spectrum, Joy James studies the paradigms and platforms that leveraged Angela Davis into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual.

Beginning in Alabama in 1944 with Davis's birthplace and ending in California in 1970 with a surrogate political family, James investigates context in order to better understand the agency and identity of Davis. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the AntiBlack repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergrad and graduate schooling-all interconnect and play a part in Davis's rise in stature from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later.

Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James highlights of the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and shows how a triumphal figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples' victory.

Genres: Nonfiction

252 pages, Hardcover

Published January 25, 2024

About the author

Joy James is the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Humanities and College Professor in Political Science at Williams College. She is the author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, and her edited works on incarceration and human rights include States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons and Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion.

Reviews

[Zach Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joy James is very quick to tell us that this is not a biography - she's not a biographer, she's an archivist, or a librarian. And that's important, because her task here is not to give an overview of Davis' life - she leaves that for An Autobiography. Rather, what she tries to do is understand the historical and material context for the rise of Angela Davis as an icon. What I found most compelling about this analysis is the juxtaposition of her life with those of the Panthers around her. In the context of James' Captive Maternal, you can see Sallye Davis sending her daughter up North to a school for better-off children, thrusting a young Angela into a life in academia, which ultimately brought her to Europe and the UC school system. She's not in Alabama when the 16th Street Baptist Church is bombed, and that will ultimately represent some of the differences between Davis, who does not engage in material struggle at this point, and the Lowndes County Panthers like Carmichael/Ture. Davis as a communist in the academy wages a different kind of struggle - one that will ultimately bring her to meet with Fidel Castro and go toe-to-toe with Ronald Reagan. When she does engage with the BPPP (not the BPP), it is as an academic. Even when she goes to trial, her appeal to the illegality of the prosecution as a US citizen stands in stark contrast with her co-defendant, Ruchell Magee, who asserted his right as a slave to rebel. This comes after the bifurcation of their trial and Angela's reception of all-star legal aid and an international campaign of support, while Magee spent 67 years in prison, only to die 3 months after his release as an 83 year old.

My one issue with the analysis is in the historical and material analysis of the Soviet Union, particularly in relation to Third World liberation struggles. Much is said about the CPSU/CPUSA doctrine of 'peaceful coexistence', with very little being said about the Soviet Union's broad engagement in decolonial/liberation struggles around the world. It's a sort of secondary analysis that's mostly used to understand Davis' motivations as a leader in the CPUSA and its relation with and against the BPP, but it was still frustratingly short-sighted for me.

James is in her prime when she discusses the material struggle in anti-Black war zones and the contradictions of academics (which she will be the first to acknowledge in her own life and work). This is very engaging and worth reading!

[n]

This was wild