2026 Knox Lecture – Tommie Shelby (Harvard University)

Abstract: This lecture will examine what role intellectuals from oppressed groups should play in the struggle for their group’s liberation. It draws on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright—canonical figures in the Black Radical tradition—to ask whether such intellectuals should subordinate their interest in art and ideas to political resistance against injustice. It also probes a deep tension between the characteristic dispositions of intellectuals and the demands of political solidarity, and it asks how (if at all) this tension might be resolved or lessened.