Eldridge Cleaver Unthought

ABSTRACT Eldridge Cleaver's era‐defining work Soul on Ice was published nearly 60 years ago, but despite being the subject of scholarly attention in a variety of disciplines, Cleaver's life and works remain misunderstood. This critical examination of six decades of Cleaver scholarship demonstrates that our understanding of Cleaver has been impeded by the hegemony of various orthodoxies and a lack of available primary sources. Bringing together scholarship from Philosophy, History, English, and area studies, I show that Cleaver scholarship changed radically following the archival turn of the last 20 years. Although the archival turn has done much to improve the state of Cleaver scholarship, we have a long way to go before we are freed from the limitations of unwarranted orthodoxies. Until that time, Eldridge Cleaver remains unthought.