Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon

Joy James investigates the educational, political, and ideological contexts that shaped Angela Davis's public persona, exploring the paradigms and platforms that leveraged her into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual. Her chronology marks key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US, highlighting the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 25 January 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Few people recognize the educational, political, and ideological contexts that shaped Angela Davis' public persona, despite her iconic status as a global figure. To better understand Davis' agency and identity, Joy James delves into the paradigms and platforms that propelled her into recognition as an activist and radical intellectual. Beginning in Alabama in 1944, where Davis was born, and ending in California in 1970, with a surrogate political family, James investigates the context to gain a deeper understanding of Davis' life. Her chronology highlights key events relevant to Davis, Black communities, and the US, including anti-Black repression under Jim Crow, Black bourgeois southern families, revolutionaries, elite education, communist parties, international travels, undergraduate and graduate schooling, and her rise from persecution as a UC graduate student to the UC Presidential chair some three decades later.

Set against the backdrop of 21st-century US democracy and the rise of neofascists, James emphasizes the centrality of those considered ancillary to US liberation movements. She unpacks the contradictions of iconography and revolutionary agency and demonstrates how a triumphant figure from a symbolic era of struggle became the icon of the rare peoples' victory.

Weight: 528g
Dimension: 163 x 242 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350368620