Presented By: Department of History
Insurgents and Intellectuals: Thought and Practice on the Left in US History
A Conference in Honor of Howard Brick
Insurgents and Intellectuals: Thought and Practice on the Left in US History
What is the historic relation of left-wing politics and modern intellectual life? How have today’s humanist disciplines in the academy been influenced by a scholarly generation radicalized as part of late-1960s insurgent movements (and by a secondary generation schooled by that one)?
Circa 1950, “the intellectuals” as a social phenomenon, whether “critical” or conformist, absorbed a great deal of attention—just as “intellectual history” stood as a prominent part of the historical discipline. Now, hardly anyone will talk of “the intellectuals” as a group, stratum, or role-carriers of a distinct sort. Within the academy, talk of “intellectuals” has devolved into a placid appreciation of “public intellectuals,” or those whom administrators value for “engaged scholarship.” But what of the “radical left” in the sense suggested by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps’s Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War: a variegated, concrete social current of dissent in the United States, from the time of the Abolitionists (circa 1830) to the present, identified with radical visions of new, dramatically transformed social relations characterized by wide-ranging emancipation, equality, and democratic participation in collective self-government?
This conference asks for a new approach to an old question regarding intellectuals and politics: To what extent has there been an identifiable left-wing intellectual tradition within and/or without the more general mainstream sense of an “American intellectual tradition”? And insofar as we can locate such, to what extent has it been historically significant—significant, that is, in terms beyond the high-cultural virtue of contributing to knowledge but in an effectual sense of helping to shape (as it is shaped by) human action generally, its structures, conflicts, and development? And finally, what can we say, historically, about the practical impact or efficacy of this radical left intellectual tradition/lineage over time or at particular moments?
Full Program:
1014 Tisch Hall
Thursday, October 5, 2023
1 pm Opening Reception
2-3:30 pm Panel 1: A Heritage of Antiracist and Anticolonial Agitation
Jay Cook (University of Michigan): “Rethinking Ira Aldridge: Actor of Color, Global Star, Insurgent Intellectual, and the Most Widely-Seen Abolitionist of the Nineteenth Century”
Mary Kelley (University of Michigan): “Journey in and through Women’s and Gender History”
Anthony Mora (University of Michigan): “Mexican Heroes in U.S. Imaginations”
4-5:30 pm Keynote Address
Nelson Lichtenstein (UC-Santa Barbara): “What is a Labor Intellectual?”
Friday, October 6, 2023
10:30-12 pm Panel 2: Prologue to the 20th-Century Left and the Emergence of Modern “Intellectuals”
Julie Greene (University of Maryland): “The Wages of Empire: U.S. Workers Confront Global Capitalism”
Eileen Boris (UC-Santa Barbara): “Emma Goldman’s ‘The Traffic in Women’ Revisited: Sex Work, Sweatshops, and Discourses of Slavery”
Kevin Gaines (University of Virginia): “Du Bois, the Black Left, and Black Radicalism”
1:30-3 pm Panel 3: Radical Intellectuals over the Course of the “Old Left”
Casey Blake (Columbia University): “Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line, Again and Again”
Alan Wald (University of Michigan): “Paradigm Dramas in U.S. Literary Radicalism”
Penny Von Eschen (University of Virginia): “Before the New Left: Anticolonial Intellectuals and the Non-Aligned Imagination”
3:30-5 pm Panel 4: The New Left and Beyond: Whither the Radicals of ’68?
Alice Echols (University of Southern California): “Paths to ‘68: ‘Organize Around Your Own Oppression’”
Christian Davenport (University of Michigan): "Mapping the DeMarketplace of Ideas: Introducing Ptolemy with Selected Applications Across Time"
Daniel Geary (Trinity College Dublin): “Radical Chic?: The Left-Liberal Revival of the 1960s and 1970s”
5:15-6:30 Panel 5: Capital and Critique (Toward a Social-Intellectual History of the Radical Left)
Margaret Somers (University of Michigan)
Greg Parker (University of Michigan)
Geoff Eley (University of Michigan)
David Spreen (Harvard University)
Dan Borus (University of Rochester)
James Maffie (University of Maryland)
What is the historic relation of left-wing politics and modern intellectual life? How have today’s humanist disciplines in the academy been influenced by a scholarly generation radicalized as part of late-1960s insurgent movements (and by a secondary generation schooled by that one)?
Circa 1950, “the intellectuals” as a social phenomenon, whether “critical” or conformist, absorbed a great deal of attention—just as “intellectual history” stood as a prominent part of the historical discipline. Now, hardly anyone will talk of “the intellectuals” as a group, stratum, or role-carriers of a distinct sort. Within the academy, talk of “intellectuals” has devolved into a placid appreciation of “public intellectuals,” or those whom administrators value for “engaged scholarship.” But what of the “radical left” in the sense suggested by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps’s Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War: a variegated, concrete social current of dissent in the United States, from the time of the Abolitionists (circa 1830) to the present, identified with radical visions of new, dramatically transformed social relations characterized by wide-ranging emancipation, equality, and democratic participation in collective self-government?
This conference asks for a new approach to an old question regarding intellectuals and politics: To what extent has there been an identifiable left-wing intellectual tradition within and/or without the more general mainstream sense of an “American intellectual tradition”? And insofar as we can locate such, to what extent has it been historically significant—significant, that is, in terms beyond the high-cultural virtue of contributing to knowledge but in an effectual sense of helping to shape (as it is shaped by) human action generally, its structures, conflicts, and development? And finally, what can we say, historically, about the practical impact or efficacy of this radical left intellectual tradition/lineage over time or at particular moments?
Full Program:
1014 Tisch Hall
Thursday, October 5, 2023
1 pm Opening Reception
2-3:30 pm Panel 1: A Heritage of Antiracist and Anticolonial Agitation
Jay Cook (University of Michigan): “Rethinking Ira Aldridge: Actor of Color, Global Star, Insurgent Intellectual, and the Most Widely-Seen Abolitionist of the Nineteenth Century”
Mary Kelley (University of Michigan): “Journey in and through Women’s and Gender History”
Anthony Mora (University of Michigan): “Mexican Heroes in U.S. Imaginations”
4-5:30 pm Keynote Address
Nelson Lichtenstein (UC-Santa Barbara): “What is a Labor Intellectual?”
Friday, October 6, 2023
10:30-12 pm Panel 2: Prologue to the 20th-Century Left and the Emergence of Modern “Intellectuals”
Julie Greene (University of Maryland): “The Wages of Empire: U.S. Workers Confront Global Capitalism”
Eileen Boris (UC-Santa Barbara): “Emma Goldman’s ‘The Traffic in Women’ Revisited: Sex Work, Sweatshops, and Discourses of Slavery”
Kevin Gaines (University of Virginia): “Du Bois, the Black Left, and Black Radicalism”
1:30-3 pm Panel 3: Radical Intellectuals over the Course of the “Old Left”
Casey Blake (Columbia University): “Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line, Again and Again”
Alan Wald (University of Michigan): “Paradigm Dramas in U.S. Literary Radicalism”
Penny Von Eschen (University of Virginia): “Before the New Left: Anticolonial Intellectuals and the Non-Aligned Imagination”
3:30-5 pm Panel 4: The New Left and Beyond: Whither the Radicals of ’68?
Alice Echols (University of Southern California): “Paths to ‘68: ‘Organize Around Your Own Oppression’”
Christian Davenport (University of Michigan): "Mapping the DeMarketplace of Ideas: Introducing Ptolemy with Selected Applications Across Time"
Daniel Geary (Trinity College Dublin): “Radical Chic?: The Left-Liberal Revival of the 1960s and 1970s”
5:15-6:30 Panel 5: Capital and Critique (Toward a Social-Intellectual History of the Radical Left)
Margaret Somers (University of Michigan)
Greg Parker (University of Michigan)
Geoff Eley (University of Michigan)
David Spreen (Harvard University)
Dan Borus (University of Rochester)
James Maffie (University of Maryland)
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