Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals.

By Anthony Bogues. New York: Routledge, 2003. 272p. $85.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Anthony Bogues begins his book as a provocative intellectual journey that is at once a political and epistemological intervention. Grounding his work in the African diaspora, he seeks to investigate black radical intellectuals on their own terms, making the argument that figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Ida B. Wells, Walter Rodney, and Bob Marley should be evaluated for unique rather than derivative contributions to political theory. In this vein, the book begins squarely within the confines of intellectual history, albeit with traditionally marginalized exemplars.

The author defines two streams of black radical thought—heretical and prophetic—which are intended to serve as organizing themes for the exemplars that follow in subsequent chapters. Defining heresy as a constitutive action of black radical intellectual production, Bogues first defines it as the engagement in a “double operation—an engagement with Western radical theory and then a critique of this theory” (p. 13). This theoretical and discursive turn is made possible only after the resolution of DuBoisian double consciousness, the “profound disjuncture between the lived experiences of being a racial/colonial subject and the account of this lived experience by his or her learned discursive system” (p. 14). The slave narrative of Quobna Cugoano, the antilynching activism of Wells, Black Jacobins by James, Black Reconstruction by DuBois, Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration by Julius Nyerere, and Groundings with My Brothers and Walter Rodney Speaks by Rodney are analyzed across four chapters in order to illuminate the heretical tradition in black radical political thought.

Throughout these chapters, Bogues stresses that the emphasis of these authors on racial vindication has made a unique contribution. In fact, it is often clear that Bogues himself has embarked on a project of racial vindication. In his uneven argument to separate Cugoano's narrative from a larger tradition of literary interpretation, the author attempts to exegetically transform the work into an exemplar of black radical heresy that fundamentally challenges natural rights theory. He is most convincing when he distinguishes Cugoano from Diderot and Locke; on the other hand, it is unclear earlier how Hannah Arendt's letters to Karl Jaspers serve this general argument.

Bogues continues this project of racial vindication in his chapters on Wells (Chapter 2), and James and DuBois (Chapter 3). The Cugoano and Wells chapters elaborately describe the dehumanizing aspects of blackness constructed by institutions of slavery and lynching and the interventions made by both authors. In the chapter on James and DuBois, one primary point of uniqueness brought to bear in support of the racial vindication project is the deployment of “Marxian categories in their interpretations of events [although] both the categories and the events were invested with new meaning” (p. 71).

Bogues is most certainly correct that James and DuBois and the other heretics he cites—Cugoano, Wells, Nyerere, and Rodney—rehumanize people of African descent through projects of racial vindication. Unfortunately, this argument is neither new nor particularly innovative. Bogues's own project of racial vindication is blind to more recent analyses that indicate its perils and problems.

Both Kevin Gaines (Uplifting the Race, 1996) and Cathy Cohen (The Boundaries of Blackness, 1999) have argued in various venues that emphasis on racial vindication served an important purpose in empowering communities of the African diaspora in their struggles for greater access to social, political, and economic resources. Yet their arguments for the earlier benefits of racial vindication were supplemented with the contemporary recognition that blind allegiance to racial vindication perpetuates intracommunity marginalization along intersecting lines of difference, such as class, gender, and sexual orientation (see also Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2002). While the analysis of Rodney's work reveals that author's grasp of intracommunity fractures, involving a complex commitment to the liberation of Guyana and other Caribbean nations that acknowledges race and class as intersecting oppressions, Bogues elides this acknowledgment (p. 127; see also pp. 71, 133, 157).

This uncritical promotion of racial vindication as an effective empowerment strategy also occurs when Bogues chronicles Nyerere's self-admitted theoretical debt to John Stuart Mill in destabilizing romanticized notions of a monolithic African past in response to gender critiques (see pp. 106–7, 121). Bogues fails to make this link among many of the heretics he analyzes. Recognition of intersecting identities and oppressions did not begin with black feminists of the 1980s and 1990s; the intellectual history of intersectionality is dotted with theoretical contributions from many of the figures he profiles. Ironically, making this point would only enhance his argument that these heretics made unique contributions to mainstream political theory.

While the heretics are described and analyzed over four chapters and 125 pages, Bogues reserves only two chapters and 48 pages to cover the second stream of black radical intellectual production, redemptive prophecy. This asymmetry quite logically leads to a thinner analysis of the redemptive prophets, which creates some concern regarding the usefulness of the overall typology for future research concerning black radical intellectuals. With no recapitulation of the contours of the redemptive prophetic stream, the author dives into a history of Rastafari and three of its best-known acolytes—Leonard Howell, Claudius Henry (Chapter 6) and Bob Marley (Chapter 7). The writing in these chapters is enthralling and reveals the author's passion for this aspect of West Indian political culture. Yet the chapters reveal little about the prophetic tradition he defines only briefly in Chapter 1 (p. 19). Given Bogues's determined efforts to prove black radical intellectuals' unique contributions, the distinction between the prophetic tradition and the heretical tradition at the end of the Rastafari chapter alludes to his preferred tradition: “However, in the redemptive prophetic stream the questions of history are posed and discussed differently. The prophetic gaze is different from that of the heretic. The heretics utilize categories that, while plotting an alternative genealogy, do not necessarily step outside the recognized episteme” (p. 184). Unfortunately, the organization of Black Heretics, Black Prophets, combined with the uncritical commitment to racial vindication, prevents the author from completely achieving the provocative intervention he sought as he embarked upon this project.