About this Elements series

Critical Black Global Thought explores the unexpected, unexplored, and undertheorized yet world-making sites of Black intellectual production. How do emergent vernacular languages shape thinking? How do everyday and popular cultural objects and communal cultural practices express ideas about identity, politics, and the world? What is the relationship between style, stylization, and theory? What can we learn from neglected figures in the Black intellectual tradition? And what insights can be gotten from texts by canonical figures that have been all but forgotten? These are our guiding questions because the Black global critical tradition has always been intertwined with play, playfulness, rhetorical critique, invention, modification, and modulation, all of which challenge critical theory to think more broadly about what counts as a theoretical intervention, what counts as thinking. With that in view, this series offers rigorous reflection on how theoretical work is done in the Black global critical tradition and how that work expands our intellectual sensibilities.