This afterword considers Cedric J. Robinson's theory of racial capitalism in relation to the South African tradition as advanced in this special issue. Both formulations of racial capitalism ...developed in the same global conjuncture. And much like the South African tradition, Robinson's theory of racial capitalism was always fundamentally a strategic one. As in the South African context, this meant transcending the stale impasse between Black nationalists and Marxists and developing novel theories to inform revolutionary strategy. Ultimately then, racial capitalism is "a concept forged and developed in struggle", as the editors put it - and it cannot be considered otherwise.
"Martin R. Delany (1812–1885) was one of the leading and most influential Black activists and nationalists in American history. His ideas have inspired generations of activists and movements, ...including Booker T. Washington in the late nineteenth century, Marcus Garvey in the early 1920s, Malcolm X and Black Power in 1960s, and even today's Black Lives Matter. Extant scholarship on Delany has focused largely on his Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist ideas. Tunde Adeleke argues that there is so much more about Delany to appreciate. In the Service of God and Humanity reveals and analyzes Delany's contributions to debates and discourses about strategies for elevating Black people and improving race relations in the nineteenth century. Adeleke examines Delany's view of Blacks as Americans who deserved the same rights and privileges accorded Whites. While he spent the greater part of his life pursuing racial equality, his vision for America was much broader. Adeleke argues that Delany was a quintessential humanist who envisioned a social order in which everyone, regardless of race, felt validated and empowered. Through close readings of the discourse of Delany's humanist visions and aspirations, Adeleke illuminates many crucial but undervalued aspects of his thought. He discusses the strategies Delany espoused in his quest to universalize America's most cherished of values—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and highlights his ideological contributions to the internal struggles to reform America. The breadth and versatility of Delany's thought become more evident when analyzed within the context of his American-centered aspirations. In the Service of God and Humanity reveals a complex man whose ideas straddled many complicated social, political, and cultural spaces, and whose voice continues to speak to America today."
Brothers Gonna Work It Out considers the political expression of rap artists within the historical tradition of black nationalism. Interweaving songs and personal interviews with hip-hop artists and ...activists including Chuck D of Public Enemy, KRS-One, Rosa Clemente, manager of dead prez, and Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous Teachers, Cheney links late twentieth-century hip-hop nationalists with their nineteenth-century spiritual forebears.Cheney examines Black nationalism as an ideology historically inspired by a crisis of masculinity. Challenging simplistic notions of hip-hop culture as simply sexist or misogynistic, she pays particular attention to Black nationalists' historicizing of slavery and their visualization of male empowerment through violent resistance. She charts the recent rejection of Christianity in the lyrics of rap nationalist music due to the perception that it is too conciliatory, and the increasing popularity of Black Muslim rap artists.Cheney situates rap nationalism in the 1980s and 90s within a long tradition of Black nationalist political thought which extends beyond its more obvious influences in the mid-to-late twentieth century like the Nation of Islam or the Black Power Movement, and demonstrates its power as a voice for disenfranchised and disillusioned youth all over the world.
How should the history of Black Americans be included in the physical landscape and memorialised? What new visual vocabularies are needed to expand the idea of the nation? Nona Faustine’s White Shoes ...series (begun in 2012) provides a compelling counternarrative to stereotypical and racist representations of Black Americans in public spaces. With her body, Faustine explores the links between colonialism, racism, and capitalism that continues to be celebrated in public monuments in the United States. Her works invite viewers to participate in and interact with the built environment in new ways that acknowledge these public spaces as sites of nationalism intimately connected to the history of US racism – slave labour, Jim Crow, and police violence. In White Shoes, Nona Faustine contests dominant and entrenched national myths through the materiality of her body – her Black body. Her interventions in public space re-inscribe a neglected history onto the urban landscapes of New York City. Faustine’s work challenges white patriarchal dominance through mediated images of Black bodies by creating presence where there is absence.
One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay's ...life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik. Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay's political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay's time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay's life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.
This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place‐making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial ...politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.
This study examines the Black Women’s Renaissance (BWR) – the flowering of literary talent among African American women at the end of the 20th century. It focuses on the historical and heritage ...novels of the 1980s and the vexed relationship between black cultural nationalism and black feminism. It argues that when the nation seemingly fell out of fashion, black women writers sought to re-create what Renan called “a soul, a spiritual principle” for their ethnic group. BWR narratives, especially those associated with womanism, appreciated “culture bearing” mothers as cultural reproducers of the nation and transmitters of its values. In this way, the writers of the BWR gave rise to “matrifocal” cultural nationalism that superseded masculine cultural nationalism of the previous decade and made black women, instead of black men, principal agents/carriers of national identity. This monograph argues that even though matrifocal nationalism empowered women, ultimately it was a flawed project. It promoted gender and cultural essentialism, i.e. it glorified black motherhood and mother-daughter bonding and condemned other, more radical models of black female subjectivity. Moreover, the BWR, vivified by middle-class and educated black women, turned readers’ attention from more contentious social issues, such as class mobility or wealth redistribution. The monograph compares the cultural nationalist novels of the 1980s with social protest novels written by the same authors in the 1970s and explains the rationale behind the change in their aesthetic and political agenda. It also contrasts novels written by womanist writers (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor to name just a few) and by African Caribbean immigrant or second-generation writers (Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff) to show that, on the score of cultural nationalism, the BWR was not a monolithic phenomenon. African American and African Caribbean women writers collectively contribu
This study explores the Beheiren movement (also known as The Citizens' Alliance for Peace in Vietnam), Japan's first transnational anti‐war movement (1965–1974). It focuses on the transcultural ...formation and transformation of its movement identity during the Vietnam war. Initially, movement participants developed an ethnoracial consciousness toward the Vietnamese based on their perceptions of a common victimization by U.S. imperialism. Yet, Beheiren leaders' transcultural interactions with both Korean detainees in the Omura Detention Facility in Japan and members of the Black Power movement in the United States helped them to develop an antiracist consciousness toward fellow Asians beyond the context of the Vietnam war. While their interactions with Korean detainees forced them to examine Japan's internal structural oppressions against fellow Asians (e.g., Korean residents in Japan) and fellow Japanese (e.g., the Okinawans), their interactions with the Black Power movement raised their awareness of antiracism and Third‐Worldism. These interactions were necessary to transforming the movement's identity, resulting in a confrontation with its own anti‐Asian racism in the local cultural context of Japanese society as well as in the form of economic imperialism in Asia.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has been canonized as an essential statement of the political theory of civil disobedience. This article examines the early reception of ...King’s essay and the development of the liberal idea of civil disobedience it has become synonymous with to argue that its canonization coincided with, and displaced, the radicalization of King’s developing thinking about disobedience. It examines published and archival writings from 1965 through 1968 to reconstruct King’s power-oriented theory of “mass” civil disobedience as it developed in response to the dual challenges of white backlash and Black Power. The basic challenge of mass civil disobedience is how to mobilize liberating acts of taking power without undercutting the possibility of transformative integration through sharing power. To articulate this dilemma, this article draws on an undertheorized category from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice to conceptualize disobedience as a practice of militant love.
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