Commemorating Black Histories of Intellectual Resistance

Commemorating Black Histories of Intellectual Resistance
Guest blog by Prof Dina Zoe Belluigi

It is timely to commemorate histories of the acts and enactors of intellectual resistance. Dread is tangible within academic communities across the world, many of which are witnessing or experiencing repressive attacks and operating within oppressive conditions. These are being exerted to stifle the critical thought of those expressing dissent against injustice. Reminders are needed of the complicated historical relation of freedom to academic freedom, and of the many traditions of resistance from which to learn and grow in fortitude, for the present.

This extended visual essay re-minds through commemoration of those who worked within ‘the university’ to counter the raciological ordering of the world, and to resist its intersections with patriarchy.

During the month of October 2025, there will a display of items on the first floor of the McClay Library that speak to intellectual resistance. They have been selected from the Main Library and Special Collections & Archives, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). Black History Month (BHM) in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Ireland is celebrated in October. In 2025, the UK BHM theme is “Standing Firm in Power and Pride”, while Ireland’s theme is “Celebrating our Sisters, Saluting our Sisters, and Honouring Matriarchs of Movements”. As you will read below, both these themes framed my selection for the display.

While activities within QUB this year include talks on Black British and Black Irish thinkers and doers, the display I’ve curated focuses on the writing of two dissenters – W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Bantu Steve Biko (1946-1977). They were rejected by those in power: the US citizen Du Bois was made stateless; Biko was tortured and killed by South Africa State Security agents. However, their selection is particularly because of their relation to academic agency within ‘the university’. Both Du Bois and Biko addressed academic citizens through their writing about the plight of people well beyond academia. Attempts were made to sanction, censor and erase their scholarship from circulation, within and beyond, academia. Yet both faced discrimination against their person within academia. Alongside a selection of their work held at our Library, I have set books which are reclamations of women intellectuals’ life and thought in the USA and South Africa in the 20th Century.