Q: “Yes. One of the things that strikes me most about African American intellectual history — and this is true also of African intellectual history or Caribbean intellectual history or Indigenous intellectual histories — is that these histories are produced from the margins — both the margins of “history” and the margins of historiography.” (Gutkin)
C: This quotation is important because it demonstrates (as newstok discusses) the space in which creativity was viable for a vast portion of African American intellectual history. This indicates that those intellectuals did not just find room for their property/ideas, but made room for it. I think this also connects to Byrd, who wrote “Their works challenged the inescapable implications of prevailing studies of the “American mind”, in reference to the works of African American scholars. Not only were they making space in the margins, but their ideas were creating a counterculture that challenged the reign of white supremacy in the space they were inhabiting.
Q: Is it more important to consider the value of these ideas in the context of the writer’s environments, or more important to consider the ideas in a vaccuum so as to give them an equal opportunity?
