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Public Lecture: Brandon M. Terry

Date: 

Thursday, February 1, 2024, 4:30pm

Location: 

Starr Auditorium, Belfer Building, 79 John F. Kennedy St, Cambridge, MA 02138

The Rhetoric of Black Populism: From Malcolm X to the "Manosphere"

 
In this public lecture from the Edmond & Lily Safra Center, Brandon Terry, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, examines the rhetoric of Malcolm X through the lens of black populism. Dr. Terry asserts that doing so can, first, help dissolve some of the interpretive impasses concerning Malcolm X’s class politics and the ethical dilemmas occasioned by his rhetoric of racial authenticity and attendant conception of “race.” Second, it might better explain Malcolm’s oddly intergenerational popularity and the interest he generates from those who are otherwise suspicious of, or at odds with, black nationalism. Finally, it helps us clarify the critical and evaluative questions we need to pose to Malcolm’s rhetoric and – even more urgently – possible reiterations of black populist speech in the present.
 
 

Bio

Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In addition to these main appointments, Brandon is a Faculty Affiliate of American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for History and Economics.

Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research as a Michael von Clemm Fellow at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.

A scholar of African American political thought, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (Boston Review/MIT 2018). He has published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum. For his work, Brandon has received fellowships, awards, and recognition from the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Center for History and Economics, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and Best American Essays.

His forthcoming book, The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement: Political Theory and the Historical Imagination (Harvard University Press) interrogates the normative and political significance of different narratives of African American history in liberalism, radicalism, and Afro-pessimism through an original synthesis of methods drawn from the philosophy of history, literary theory, and political philosophy. Following this, he will release a book on the political thought, praxis, and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House).

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