Anthony Neal

In Common Ground, Anthony Neal examines the role that the ideas of consciousness and consciousness-raising play in the writings of Howard Thurman and Huey Newton. He examines these ideas from a broadly Afrocentric framework in which the concerns, interests, and perspectives of Africans--whether they reside on the continent or live in the African diaspora--are the legitimate and central subjects of scholarly study. This approach warrants Neal’s interpretation of Thurman’s and Newton’s writings as fitting within the “African Freedom Aesthetic,” in which the aesthetic expressions of transcendence, transformation, human consciousness, and collective will have become the means by which Africans living under oppressive conditions during the modern period could work to liberate themselves from those conditions.

In this author-meets critics discussion of Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism, Anthony Sean Neal argues that Thurman’s work requires systematic recognition of how he was rooted firmly within the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle (1896–1975). Michael Barber suggests that Thurman may be understood in contrast to Levinas on two counts. Whereas Thurman develops the duty to love from within the one who must love, Levinas grasps the origin of love’s duty in the command of the one who is to be loved. And while Thurman’s mysticism yearns for oneness, Levinas warns that oneness is ethically problematic. Eddie O'Byrn challenges the symbolic validity of calling love a weapon, and asks why the book has not treated Thurman’s relations to Gandhi or King. Neal defends a provisional usage of the term weapon in relation to love and offers some preliminary considerations of Thurman’s relation to Gandhi and King, especially in the symbolic significance of "the dream."

Since the publication of The Man-Not in July of 2017, the wealth of empirical information challenging the conclusions of intersectionality and Black masculinity studies has gained the public’s attention. The Man-Not argues that in western patriarchal societies Black males and other racialized men and boys are targeted for extermination and social ostracization. Following the work of social dominance theorists and Global South Masculinities, Black Male Studies argues that patriarchy places outgroup-racialized men at the bottom of the social hierarchy.