In The Belly Special Issue

The Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition

DEAR COMRADES,

This is not Volume 3 of In The Belly, it’s a special issue. While ITB is regularly written primarily by imprisoned people, Editor-In-Chief Stephen Wilson wanted to share this document with you. It is a roundtable, a series of interviews, that he conducted with a group of non-incarcerated comrades who have spent a long time writing and thinking about the Black Radical Tradition.

In these interviews, which were published online by the African American Intellectual History Society on their blog Black Perspectives, Stevie and his partners in conversation think about the relationship between confinement and the Black Radical Tradition, or what Stevie calls the “Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition” (abbreviated as IBRT). This version includes sections which were not published on the blog.

Stevie, and the whole ITB editorial group, strongly invite responses to what you read in these pages. Please send us questions, critiques, praise, expansions on these ideas, interventions, and even raw thoughts and reactions. This text is the record of a conversation, and without incarcerated Black perspectives, according to the ideas developed collaboratively in this document, it is an unfinished work. An open conversation. We hope you will read it, engage with it, share it, and push it farther by writing a response.

We are sorry that it’s been a minute. As we find our footing, we are trying to work in a way that puts intentional leadership over urgency. As you know, when that leadership is held captive, the delays of mail inspection, email surveillance, lockdown, personal retaliation, and the hole don’t respect our self-imposed deadlines. But we’re working, and we’re receiving all your beautiful writing. Keep it coming. We’ll have Volume 3 out by the end of the year.

Yours in struggle,
In The Belly

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