Johnson writes:

“What do historians of the earlier period do when dealing with black diasporic subjects laboring and living in a world of ideas, philosophies, and cosmologies but largely without alphanumeric texts? Does this black intellectual production only start becoming intellectual history when texts written by people of African descent begin to appear? What new possibilities for intellectual work open when the enslaved and the period of slavery become central?

Instead of approaches, below are five written texts I often return to when thinking with (not necessarily through) and engaging the intellectual production of people of African descent circling the Atlantic before emancipation….”

Read the entire post: Thinking with Black Diasporic Intellectual Production | African American Intellectual History Society