Online Roundtable: Ula Taylor’s The Promise of Patriarchy
May 21-25, 2018
Black Perspectives is collaborating with the Journal of Civil and Human Rights (JCHR)* to host a roundtable on Ula Y. Taylor’s The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). It begins on Monday, May 21, 2018, and concludes on Friday, May 25, 2018. Printed (and extended) versions of the responses will be published in the JCHR in Issue 5:1 (December 2018). The roundtable will feature responses from Ashley D. Farmer, Gerald Horne, Asia Leeds, Erik S. McDuffie, and Robyn C. Spencer. On the final day, Ula Taylor will offer concluding remarks.
During the week of the online roundtable, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:30AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter; like AAIHS on Facebook; or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.
About the Author
Ula Yvette Taylor is a Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities. Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013, she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award. Taylor is most proud, however, of her brilliant graduate students who currently hold post-doctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Southern California; along with former students who are now assistant and associate professors at Spelman College, Rutgers University, University of Southern California, University of Texas, Austin, Middlebury College, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Georgia State, University of Iowa, Penn State, Roanoke College, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wayne State, University of Pennsylvania, and Michigan State.
About the Participants
Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of Black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the African American Studies Program at Boston University. In Fall 2018, she will join the Department of History and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, is the first comprehensive study of Black women’s intellectual production and activism in the Black Power era. Farmer’s scholarship has appeared in numerous venues including The Black Scholar and The Journal of African American History. She has also contributed to popular outlets like The Independent and the History Channel. She is a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and a regular blogger for Black Perspectives. She is also the Co-Editor and Curator of the Black Power Series with Ibram X. Kendi, published with NYU Press. Farmer earned her BA from Spelman College, an MA in History and a PhD in African American Studies from Harvard University. Follow her on Twitter @drashleyfarmer.
Gerald Horne is one of the leading and most influential historians in the nation. He currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He is the author of more than thirty books including Negro Comrades of the Crown: African-Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (NYU Press, 2012); The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (NYU Press, 2014); and Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (Pluto Press, 2016). His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University. Horne’s undergraduate courses include the Civil Rights Movement and U.S. History through Film. He also teaches graduate courses in Diplomatic History, Labor History and 20th Century African American History. Horne uses a variety of teaching techniques that enrich his classes and motivate students to participate.
Asia Leeds is assistant professor and co-director in the African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. Her research interests include Afro-Latin America, Caribbean migrations, and Black women’s internationalism. Based on fieldwork and archival research in Central America, she is currently working on her first book, which investigates black citizenship and the racial geographies of belonging in Costa Rica. Her most recent article, “Toward the ‘Higher Type of Womanhood’: The Gendered Contours of Garveyism and the Mapping of Redemptive Geographies in Costa Rica, 1922-1940,” appears in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. In her related post, “Mapping the Global Contours and Local Translations of Garveyism” on Black Perspectives, she emphasizes the need for more research on Garveyism’s impact in Central America and highlights some of the local articulations of Garveyism in Limón, Costa Rica. She was also recently quoted in the CNN article, ‘Black girl magic’ is more than a hashtag; it’s a movement. Leeds received a social science in practice postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and was jointly housed in the Interdepartmental Program in African American Studies and the Department of History. Follow her on Twitter @AsiaLeeds.
Erik S. McDuffie is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching interests include African diaspora history, black feminism, black queer theory, black radicalism, black urban history, and black masculinity. He is the author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011). The book received the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association-Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. He is also the author of several scholarly articles and essays published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Journal of African American History; African Identities; African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal; Journal of West African History; Women, Gender and Families of Color; Radical History Review; American Communist History; Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; among other journals and edited volumes. Currently, he is working on a new book-length manuscript, tentatively titled “Garveyism in the Diasporic Midwest: The American Heartland and Global Black Freedom, 1920-80.” He recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship to complete this book. Follow him on Twitter @ErikSMcDuffie.
Robyn C. Spencer is a historian whose research centers on social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College, City University of New York. Her writings on the Black Panther Party have appeared in The Journal of Women’s History, Souls, Radical Teacher and several collections of essays on the 1960s. Her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, analyzes the organizational evolution of the Black Panther Party in Oakland and was published by Duke University Press in December 2016. In 2016-17 she received a Mellon fellowship at Yale University to work on her second book project, To Build the World Anew: Black Liberation Politics and the Movement Against the Vietnam War. This project examines how working class African Americans’ anti-imperialist consciousness in the 1950s-1970s shaped their engagement with the movement against the Vietnam War. In many ways, it continues her emphasis on exploring overlapping and intersecting boundaries between social protest movements. She is also working on a short biography of Angela Davis for Westview Press’ Lives of American women series. Follow her on Twitter @racewomanist.
*The Journal of Civil and Human Rights is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, academic journal dedicated to studying modern U.S.-based social justice movements and freedom struggles, including transnational ones, and their antecedents, influence, and legacies. The journal features research-based articles, interviews, editorials, state-of-the-field pieces, and book forums.
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