Black radicalism

From January 4-11, 1968, nearly 500 delegates from 70 countries congregated at the Hotel Habana Libre for the unprecedented Cultural Congress of Havana (CCH). Advertised as a “meeting of intellectuals from all the world to discuss problems of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” the congress drew broad participation from the arts and included presentations by literary giants like Mario Benedetti, Mario de Andrade, René Depestre, C.L.R. James, and Alex La Guma, among many others. This essay considers the 1968 CCH as a key site of Global South cold war cultural exchange. Although understudied, the impacts of the CCH were many. In Cuba, for example, the conference’s interrogation of intellectuals’ participation in revolutionary politics undergirded some of the island’s most important artistic works, such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias de subdesarrollo (1968), released a few months after the conference. The ideas expressed at the congress also played a significant role in the Cuban government’s subsequent crackdown on cultural and artistic freedoms during its quinquenio gris (five gray years, 1971-76). Furthermore, the CCH was the site of a controversy among prominent Black Cuban writers after state officials prevented these writers from speaking at the congress about ongoing racial inequalities on the island. This essay examines such tensions within the context of the CCH through an analysis of Havana Journal (1971), the memoir by Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey about his participation. Havana Journal sheds significant light on how the CCH revealed as many fissures as solidarities, and in this sense, it provides a window onto a more nuanced understanding of global solidarity movements within the cultural cold war.

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on " black bodies. " On one hand, the language of " black bodies, " as opposed to simply " black people " or " black personhood, " makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of " black disembodiment. " This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates's book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.

This book provides a new interpretation of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most important African American scholars and thinkers of the 20th century.

This revealing biography captures the full life of W.E.B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, author, editor, and a leader in the fight to bring African Americans more fully into the American landscape as well as a forceful proponent of their leaving America altogether and returning to Africa. Drawing on extensive research and including new primary documents, sidebars, and analysis, Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly offer a portrait of this remarkable man, paying special attention to the often-overlooked radical decades at the end of Du Bois's life.

The book also highlights Du Bois's relationships with and influence on civil rights activists, intellectuals, and freedom fighters, among them Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Louise Thompson Patterson, William Alphaeus Hunton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The biography includes a selection of primary source documents, including personal letters, speeches, poems, and newspaper articles, that provide insight into Du Bois's life based on his own words and analysis.

This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority of Black subjectivity. I argue that the rupturing of intimacy and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should be understood not as an incidental byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition of genocide. Next, I theorize letter writing as an ethnographic and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire of strategies that Black men deploy to survive within and rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence between myself and Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York's radical prison

In August and October of 1970, amidst the explosive political struggles of the era, thousands of incarcerated people rebelled in five New York City jails across three city boroughs and Rikers Island. This essay examines the historical, political, and structural causes of the rebellion and analyzes the words, deeds, tactics, and strategies of the captives who organized it. In doing so, it exposes carceral institutions as sites of domestic warfare, reveals that law and order is always contested, and shows how the organization of disorder can be a productive site of revolutionary politics.

From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.

In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance-and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

In this thesis I analyze in depth Kendrick Lamar's albums good kid, m.A.A.d city, To Pimp a Butterfly, and DAMN. Through a close reading of these albums, I examine the ways in which Lamar uses his music as a platform for prophetic music making. Lamar's prophetic music making comes to bear three general points, corresponding to each album: first, that vices are inadequate to deal with death-anxieties and it is only Jesus Christ that gives meaning to death and life. Second, that capitalism is a tool of American Anti-Blackness and this relationship is undergirded by satanic forces. Third, that God is both a God of salvation and of damnation, so it is important to relate to God with due humility. Through these three points, I argue that Lamar's prophetic music making can teach us something about the nature of the prophetic, that the prophet is a Divine-World discloser.

This article examines the shared radical Black female subjectivity and practice of mutual comradeship that bind Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones. It argues that their interrelation provides Boyce Davies with unique insight into Jones's manifold intellectual, theoretical, and political contributions and has allowed Jones to animate and shape Boyce Davies's approach to preserving and interpreting her legacy. The conclusion considers the ways that Jones and Boyce Davies offer an alternative epistemology that is instructive for scholars who seek to learn from and continue their ethical and political approach to scholar-activism.

Desde principios del siglo XX, organizaciones y movimientos antirracistas de población negra se acercaron a los postulados del marxismo. Su razonamiento era sencillo: si esta era la teoría de los pueblos explotados, seguro que sería un aporte interesante para la población negra, una de las más explotadas del mundo. Este binomio de marxismo y antirracismo produjo algunas de las más potentes reflexiones del pensamiento crítico a nivel mundial, anticipando elementos fundamentales de teorías contemporáneas en boga como las perspectivas del sistema-mundo, el colonialismo interno, las teorías de la dependencia o los enfoques poscoloniales y decoloniales. Sin embargo, debido a un intenso racismo intelectual y académico, estas contribuciones son aún muy desconocidas y no forman parte de la oferta curricular de casi ninguna universidad.

La población negra fue fundamental para erigir el sistema capitalista a nivel mundial. Es hora de que dejen de ser meros objetos de estudio de interés etnográfico y empecemos a tomarles en serio como sujetos productores de un conocimiento social crítico de alto valor para la comprensión de nuestros tiempos.

This essay loiters among conversations on self-determination emerging out of Black radical and critical Indigenous intellectual and political traditions, conversations that raise fundamental questions about radical imaginations beyond the settler state, radical imaginations based on practices of survival grounded in relationship to place. My method is a contrapuntal genealogy of histories and ideas about self-determination driving toward Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization, which destabilize commonplace understandings of the form and function of the nation concept in North America. I focus here on self-determination, and not Black freedom, or Indigenous sovereignty, in order to contemplate the distinctions and interrelationships between Black and Indigenous internationalisms, proposals, and practices of territorial autonomy beyond the partitioning violence of the nation-state form that also challenge the limits of twentieth-century decolonization. The perspectives and demands of Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization potentially unravel U.S. claims to legitimacy and coherence. Self-determination, in the contemporary moment, has the potential to yield authority from governing states. In Black and Indigenous contexts, self-determination calls into question the nature of North American nations, decolonization, and relationship to place.

This article maps transatlantic connections among black liberation movements in Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom through the political biography of three sisters. Two generations of freedom fighters within one transnational family – Althea, Jennifer and Beverley Jones – battled patriarchy, poverty and police violence in the decolonising Atlantic World. As the warships of new empires fortified investments of old, youth in Trinidad and Tobago came of age amid stark unemployment, ruthless political repression and overseas control of finance and industry. Educated by anti-colonial nationalist movements, radical young women and girls resuscitated and revised freedom projects abandoned by their parents. Althea, Jennifer and Beverley Jones battled racism and gender violence mobilised both against and within anti-imperialist movements. Organising within the Caribbean, or migrating throughout the Caribbean diaspora, young black revolutionaries like the Jones sisters confronted circuits of power underwritten by multinational corporations, authoritarian patriarchy and police terror.

May 2014 MA Thesis
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Department of History

This project investigates historical relationships between Black Radicalism and Marxist
internationalism from the mid-nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. It
argues that contrary to scholarly accounts that emphasize Marxist Euro-centrism, or that
theorize the incompatibility of “Black” and “Western” radical projects, Black Radicals
helped shape and produce Marxist theory and political movements, developing
theoretical and organizational innovations that drew on both Black Radical and Marxist
traditions of internationalism. These innovations were produced through experiences of
struggle within international political movements ranging from the abolition of slavery in
the nineteenth century to the early Pan-African movements and struggles against racism
and colonialism in the early twentieth century. Taking into account recent contributions
to the historiography of Black Radicalism and international Marxism in the twentieth
century, this thesis fills an important gap by examining how the “Black International”
influenced Karl Marx himself during the American Civil War. It also addresses the
contentious and problematic relationships between Black socialists and white Marxists in
the American Socialist Party, within the context of emerging Pan African movements and
the broader debates surrounding Marxism in the lead up to World War I. Additionally,
this thesis reexamines the relationships between Marxism and Black radicals following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, incorporating into its discussion the largely neglected
theoretical and organizational activities of the Marxist left that gravitated around Leon
Trotsky and the Left Opposition following 1928, rather than focusing strictly on figures
who remained organizationally and theoretically tied to the Communist International
during the 1930s and 1940s.

Dans l’histoire africaine-américaine, le pessimisme ne porte pas sur les Noirs, mais sur la capacité de la société blanche à dépasser sa négrophobie. Et si les idées et réformes que nous tenons pour progressistes n’étaient que des métamorphoses du racisme ? À l’ère de Black Lives Matter, la permanence de la déshumanisation et de la mise à mort des Noirs apparaît comme un socle de nos sociétés civiles.
Ce livre s’oppose aux visions simplistes, lisses ou iréniques de la pensée africaine-américaine actuelle. L’intersectionnalité n’est pas la seule manière de penser race, genre et classe d’un point de vue noir. Noirceur présente un ensemble de théories iconoclastes, de débats contemporains et de stratégies politiques pour repenser radicalement l’avenir des vies noires en Amérique et dans le monde.

This essay takes the motif of ruin as an entry point for a foray into the subject of the commons. It engages Garrett Hardin’s nearly unknown discussions of literature and poetry to shed critical light on his famous idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and on the general relation of the commons to questions of language and measure. To summon resources for thinking against enclosure, the essay follows an itinerary that constellates historian J. M. Neeson, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the poet and theorist Fred Moten, and the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth.

Instead of one black intellectual tradition, there are black intellectual traditions.  After discussing the origins of intellectual work among people designated "black," this article explores various intellectual movements from black nationalisms, liberal, conservative, and radical movements to those organized round Afrocentricity, existentialism, feminism, philosophy, religious thought, and other areas of research and activism.

Être africain ou afrodescendant, c’est provenir d’un peuple dont l’humanité fut contestée sur les plans juridique, scientifique, philosophique, théologique, économique, psychiatrique. On n’en continue pas moins à exiger des Afrodescendants qu’ils cessent de « ressasser », de « ruminer » l’histoire coloniale, répétant ainsi une vieille injonction esclavagiste à l’oubli des ancêtres et à la méconnaissance de la communauté d’origine.
Pourquoi prendre la question sous l’angle de la dignité ? La dignité est ce que le Blanc essaie d’abolir lorsqu’il exerce sa violence sur le Noir. Mais c’est aussi ce dont le Blanc se prive lui-même lorsqu’il exerce sa violence sur le Noir. Enfin, c’est ce que le Noir réaffirme collectivement lorsqu’il s’engage contre la domination blanche. Lorsque la dignité d’un jeune Noir est prise d’assaut, lorsqu’il est violé ou assassiné par les représentants de l’État, c’est une longue histoire de luttes, de conquêtes et d’affirmation d’une humanité africaine qui vacille et tremble sur ses bases.
La Dignité ou la Mort propose une implacable analyse critique de la tradition philosophique européenne. Mais c’est pour mieux renouer avec l’histoire méconnue de la pensée radicale des mondes noirs. Les révoltes d’esclaves, la négritude, les usages révolutionnaires du christianisme en Amérique du Nord et en Afrique du Sud, l’ontologie politique seront autant d’étapes d’un véritable parcours de libération.
La dignité est la capacité de l’opprimé à tenir debout entre la vie et la mort.

The antagonistic racial, economic and cultural climate Afro-Jamaicans faced during and following enslavement led to numerous revolts, plots and conspiracies. Whereas numerous studies on Jamaica's revolts, from the 1820's onward, credits the fight for social change to missionary based religions, of the Baptists, Moravians and Methodists, I highlight contrary to this view that Obeah, the target of missionary disdain, was the driving force in Afro-Jamaica's fight for justice and freedom. Supporting this view are the various plots and revolts that occurred between the 1820's and 1860's. Within these events Obeah specialists and rituals were indispensable. To illustrate Obeah's primacy the article features Guinea Jack, a renowned Obeah man in the 1820's with a prominent role as spiritual doctor and diviner for the 1824 Boxing Day Conspiracy. And for the emancipation period the paper examines Paul Bogle and his Morant Bay War. Bogle in most studies is typified as a Baptist minister however he performed Obeah rituals Guinea Jack had used in the 1820's. Doing so enshrines Obeah as a coherent religious cultural system inherited between generations rather than a hodgepodge free for all superstitious practice as white missionaries had implied. Exposing this aspect in Paul Bogle's spirituality challenges previous assumptions where he is strictly viewed through Christian lens. Interrogating Bogle's association with African spirituality showed that as late as 1865 Obeah for many Afro-Jamaicans remained valuable in the fight for freedom. And to explain Obeah's contribution in struggles to combat the evils of slavery and colonization, between the 1820's and 1860's, the article discusses oath rituals, herbal baths, animal sacrifices and divinations.

Offering a sustained reading of Mark Mathabane's K*ffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (1986), this essay examines the autobiography in light of Steve Biko's thought to demonstrate how Mathabane's stated goals of challenging racism and advancing liberation for Black people are in conflict with his liberalism. Interrogating the autobiography in view of Black Consciousness philosophy brings into stark relief the contradictions that inform its racial politics. As I read the work against the grain and probe the reasons for its enduring popularity among US readers, I show that, paradoxically, Mathabane both conceals and makes visible the workings of white supremacy. While Mathabane argues that white liberals are not responsible for apartheid, he unwittingly demonstrates the opposite, thereby exposing how white liberals worked alongside white nationalists to uphold racial dictatorship in South Africa. The autobiography thus illustrates what Biko calls "the totality of the white power structure," namely how white people work as a collective across ideological boundaries to maintain the racist status quo. In the process, the work shows that the attempt to fold Black people into the logics of liberalism upholds the racism that liberalism depends upon. Ultimately, K*ffir Boy reveals not only the fallacies of liberalism and impossibility of white antiracism, but also the unwavering importance of Black Consciousness in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation.

This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture.  eir pro- motion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shi  in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé’s hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cul- tural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé’s fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ulti- mately sustain her personal empire.

To unpack the complexities of Africana resistance, particularly its most “radical” elements—whether expressed through collective or/and individual activities and thought, it is vital to identify and map the traditions that inform and challenge their praxis. To be clear, the processes of identification and mapping is to highlight points of continuity and discontinuity in order to understand distortions to expressed objectives, particularly if those expressed objectives are justice, equality and freedom.

This collection translates some of the work of the influential Black Brazilian thinker and activist Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) for the first time into English, in collaboration with her only daughter, Bethânia Gomes. Historian, poet, theorist and organiser, Beatriz Nascimento was a key figure in Brazil's Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. She dangerously wrote at the height of Brazil's Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), and theorised extensively on the Black condition in Brazil; the unique experience of Black women; and quilombos-Brazilian maroon societies that she imagined as spaces of both historical and contemporary fugitivity. Following Alex Ratts, this introduction outlines her contribution to radical geography, in particular Black geogra-phies, territoriality and embodiment. It also positions Nascimento within the trans-Atlantic Black radical tradition. We present two of Nascimento's essays in translation here. The first, "The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance", introduces a crucial strand of her scholarly work, on the history and socio-political significance of quilombos (maroon communities). The second, "For a (New) Existential and Physical Territory", shows Nascimento in a different mood: philosophical, reflective and iconoclastic. In addition, two of her poems-"Dream" and "Sun and Blue"-are also translated here for the first time.

In the midst of struggles against racial oppression in the United States that intensified in and around 1968, activists developed the theory of the internal colony to contend that US imperialism was essential to understanding racial oppression in the heart of empire. The theory of the internal colony foregrounded alliances with struggles for national liberation abroad, articulated through an internationalist and Third Worldist position. This essay is a critical evaluation of the theory of the internal colony as a political perspective, its use and circulation within militant movements against racial oppression during the long 1960s, and its cultural and theoretical resonances today. Through the work of Robert L. Allen, the essay argues that the internal colony was a crucial lens through which to read both the rise of law and order and neoliberal political formations. Furthermore, drawing on the critiques of imperialism and finance, first developed by Lenin, that inspired movements for Third World emancipation through dependency theory from Latin American scholars and the theory of neocolonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, the author argues for a reevaluation of the theory of the internal colony in the context of contemporary financialization in the United States and elsewhere as a way to reinvigorate theories of geographical dislocation that remap solidarities in struggles against the financial dispossession today.

This article sets out a few key questions, themes, and problems animating an Azanian social and political philosophy, with specific reference to the radical promise of undoing South African disciplinary knowledges. The article is made up of two parts: The first part discusses the epistemic and political forces arrayed against black radical thought in South Africa and beyond. A few current trends of anti-black thinking-liberal racism, Left Eurocentrism, and postcolonial post-racialism-which pose challenges for the legibility of Azanian critique are outlined. Part two constructs an exposition and synthesis of key tenets of Azanian thinking elaborated upon under three signs: 'South Africa', 'race and racism', and 'Africa'. The aim of the discussion is to illustrate the critical, emancipatory potential of Azanian thought and its radical incommensurability with dominant strands of scholarship in the human and social sciences today. The article ultimately defends the reassertion of black radical thought in the South African academy today and underscores in particular the abolitionist drive of Azanian political thought.

Continuing from their joint work in the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe both started developing a new theory of populism in the early 2000s. This paper defines it as a double ontology of politics, which includes both enmity — the dissociative dimension of the political-and deliberation — the associative dimension. In order to distinguish their approach from right-wing populism, Laclau and Mouffe resort to uncompromising antiessentialism which casts history out of the construction of the political subject. Doing so, they assimilate consistent anti-colonial and anti-racist movements to conservatism and reaction. These confusions originate in insufficient problematization of the racial question and anti-racism activism, that the authors often invoke but never analyze properly. These shortcomings require a reformulation of left-wing populism of which the question of pluralism could provide the starting point.

Building upon critical education policy studies of crisis, disaster, and reform, this essay develops a theory of recovery that further elaborates the nature and operation of ‘crisis politics’ in neoliberal education reform. Recovery is an integral process in capital accumulation, exploiting material and subjective vulnerability in order to bridge crisis to crisis. Capitalizing on crises, neoliberal reformers position privatization as the mechanism of recovery. Rather than acknowledge their complicity in creating crises, neoliberals externalize the demands of recovery onto schools, teachers, and students. This essay calls for critical educators, social justice advocates, and communities subjected to crises to refuse the neoliberal terms of recovery and to affirm the collective potential to break the cycle of crisis and recovery so intrinsic to capitalist accumulation. Although this essay emphasizes the dialectic of crisis and recovery in United States education policy, this lens is relevant across a variety of national and transnational contexts.