In 1969, Martin Kilson became the first tenured African American professor at Harvard University, where he taught African and African American politics for over thirty years. In A Black Intellectual's Odyssey, Kilson takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in the small Pennsylvania milltown of Ambler to his experiences attending Lincoln University-the country's oldest HBCU-to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member. This is as much a story of his travels from the racist margins of twentieth-century America to one of the nation's most prestigious institutions as it is a portrait of the places that shaped him. He gives a sweeping sociological tour of Ambler as a multiethnic, working-class company town while sketching the social, economic, and racial elements that marked everyday life. From narrating the area's history of persistent racism and the racial politics in the integrated schools to describing the Black church's role in buttressing the town's small Black community, Kilson vividly renders his experience of northern small-town life during the 1930s and 1940s. At Lincoln University, Kilson's liberal political views coalesced as he became active in the local NAACP chapter. While at Lincoln and during his graduate work at Harvard, Kilson observed how class, political, and racial dynamics influenced his peers' political engagement, diverse career paths, and relationships with white people. As a young professor, Kilson made a point of assisting Harvard's African American students in adapting to life at a white institution. Throughout his career, Kilson engaged in pioneering scholarship while mentoring countless students. A Black Intellectual's Odyssey features contributions from three of his students: a foreword by Cornel West and an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of THE UNDERCOMMONS."This is a powerful book, made of words and sounds, crisscrossed by subversion and love, written and studied 'with and for, ' as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it. The roar of the battle is never distant while reading THE UNDERCOMMONS. The London riots and occupy, practices of refusal, marronage and flight, slave revolts and anti-colonial uprisings frame a challenging rethinking of concepts such as policy and planning, debt and credit, governance and logistics. THE UNDERCOMMONS is a homage to the black radical tradition, to its generative and constituent power before the task of imagining 'dispossessed feelings in common' as the basis of a renewed communism."--Sandro Mezzadra"What kind of intervention can cut through neoliberal configuration of today's university, which betrays its own liberal commitment to bring about emancipation? THE UNDERCOMMONS is a powerful and necessary intervention that invites us to imagine and realise social life otherwise. In this intimate and intense example of affected writing--writing which is always already other, with an other--Harney and Moten dare us to fall. Following, feeling, an other possible manner living together, or as one may say with Glissant--to be 'born into the world, ' which is the fate and gift of blackness. Otherwise living, as in the quilombos created by Brazilian slaves, is the promise that is escape "--Denise Ferreira da Silva

Calling for the transformation of undergraduate education, Thomas and Harney argue that the liberal arts should be integrated into the traditional management curriculum to blend technical and analytic acumen with creativity, critical thinking, and ethical intelligence. In describing their vision for a new liberal management education, the authors demonstrate how a holistic pedagogy that does not sacrifice one wealth of learning for another instead encourages participation and integration to the benefit of students and society. Global in sweep, the book provides case studies of successfully implemented experimental courses in Asia and Britain, as well as a speculative chapter on how an African liberal management education could take shape, based on African-centred principles and histories. Finally, the book argues that the stakes of this agenda go beyond mere curricular reform and pedagogical innovation and speak directly to the environmental, business, political, and social challenges we face today.

An innovative contribution to political theory, "State Work" examines the labor of government workers in North America. Arguing that this work needs to be theorized precisely because it is vital to the creation and persistence of the state, Stefano Harney draws on thinking from public administration and organizational sociology, as well as poststructuralist theory and performance studies, to launch a cultural studies of the state. Countering conceptions of the government and its employees as remote and inflexible, Harney uses the theory of mass intellectuality developed by Italian worker-theorists to illuminate the potential for genuine political progress inherent within state work.
"State Work" begins with an ethnographic account of Harney's work as a midlevel manager within an Ontario government initiative charged with leading the province's efforts to combat racism. Through readings of material such as "The X-Files" and "Law & Order," Harney then reviews how popular images of the state and government labor are formed within American culture and how these ideas shape everyday life. He highlights the mutually dependent roles played in state work by the citizenry and civil servants. Using as case studies Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government and a community-policing project in New York City, Harney also critiques public management literature and performance measurement theories. He concludes his study with a look at the motivations of state workers.