We begin our inquiry with the assumption that the sites of emergence named above can provide cultural and institutional frameworks for generating critiques of, for example, U.S. globalism; market liberalism; the state-sponsored violence of police brutality, mass incarceration, and military occupation; and Euro-American centered paradigms of development and human rights. PRPW takes its inspiration from scholars, artists, and activists who generate these kinds of critiques by locating their own work in the long history of radical thought that saturates African-American intellectual practice. As scholars such as Cornel West, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Robin Kelley have shown, it is these Black public rhetorics—from blues, jazz, hip-hop, and the Socratic-prophetic, to anti-colonial and Black internationalist thought—which have most imaginatively conceptualized struggles for freedom and citizenship. They have done so by calling attention to the dissonance between democratic inclusion and a free market capitalism implemented and rationalized through the mechanisms of systematic violence and dehumanization.

Suheir Hammad (November, 2005), spoken word poet and political activist, was born in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents in the early 1970s. Hammad’s family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York when she was still a child, and she began writing poetry at an early age. Her work, published in her memoir Drops of this Story (1996), groundbreaking poetry collection Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), and the forthcoming ZaatarDiva (2005), interrogates conceptions of identity formation in the overlapping spaces of local, national, and global conflict. She sees her work as combating violence transnationally through the popular production of poetry and film. Hammad is a recipient of the Audre Lourde Writing Award from Hunter College, the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award, and a New York Mills Artist Residency in Minnesota. She has read her poems in Ivy League universities and on Brooklyn’s street corners, starred in the Tony Award winning Broadway production Def Poetry Jam, and her work has appeared in award winning anthologies as well as zines stapled together by queer youth collectives.

Van Jones (April, 2006) is the founder and National Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC). Headquartered in San Francisco, EBC is a national organization that challenges human rights abuses in the U.S. criminal justice system. Jones is a 1990 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Martin and a 1993 graduate of the Yale Law School. He is a steadfast opponent of policies that result in the over-imprisonment and unlawful abuse of marginalized peoples in the United States. He is helping to lead a national fight for alternatives to the criminal justice system. He has been recognized internationally for his work on human rights, receiving numerous awards including the Rockefeller Foundation ‘Next Generation Leadership’ Fellowship, the Reebok International Human Rights Award, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Leader for Tomorrow Award.

Michael Denning (May, 2006), William R. Kenan Professor of American Studies at Yale University, has written the definitive book on 1930s public intellectual culture, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. His most recent book, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, explores the political and intellectual battles over the meaning of culture in the context of post-World War II globalization. His work is particularly useful for examining the role of culture in the rise of U.S. global hegemony. In addition, Denning has a reputation as a scholar invested in supporting the work of graduate students.

Nikhil Pal Singh (May, 2006), Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, has recently published Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy an award-winning innovative social history of the long civil rights movement in which radical hopes and global dreams are seen as central to the history of black struggle. Through his prolific work on the black radical tradition and its articulation with the development of United States imperialism, Singh has become positioned as a prominent public intellectual, an incisive historian, and a generous mentor. He has given invited lectures at an array of prominent universities as well as public venues like Benaroya Hall, the Triple Door, and Elliott Bay Book Company.