From Dynamite Hill to The Black Power Mixtape

Angela Davis on the Violence/Nonviolence Binary and the Mediation of Black Political Thought

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6350002
AutoresLaura Beard (0000-0002-9374-0782, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen51
Número4
Páginas645-673
Fecha de publicación2023-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00905917231155291
OpenAlexW4362581299
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas20

This essay explores the archive of a 1971 interview of Angela Davis by Swedish journalist Bo Holmström—recorded in Santa Clara County Jail where Davis awaited trial—to examine the relationship between Black radical thought and its social and intellectual mediation, especially when it comes to questions of violence versus nonviolence. Where Holmström invokes the “violence/nonviolence” binary in the interview, Davis pointedly resists its distortions, restoring the record of contemporary and historical conditions of racial terror that both necessitate and criminalize Black self-defense. Decades later, the interview was filtered through the violence/nonviolence binary in editing for the acclaimed 2011 documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, with Davis’s wider conversation with Holmström not only abridged but remixed into a shorter exchange on armed self-defense. Studying the interview from its conditions of possibility through its later remixing, and reading it together with her opening defense statement (1972) and later speeches and writings, the essay excavates and explicates Davis’s original theoretical interventions and indexes a cluster of forces that mediate Black radical thought, Black women’s radical thought more specifically, and prison texts. The final section historicizes Davis’s theorization of the spatial and relational contexts of Black self-defense in Dynamite Hill, Alabama, and in California, and contends that her incisive interventions into the violence/nonviolence binary in 1971 remain critical here and now

Black Power · Criminology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Race, History, and American Society