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An investigation of interwar African American critiques of racism and colonialismGBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup(['ISBN:9781474409681','ISBN:9781474409582','ISBN:9781474409575','ISBN:1474409599']);This volume re-publishes key texts produced by African American anti-colonial activists between 1917-1937. Some of these texts remain well-known, but many have disappeared from view and are once again re-inserted in their original polemical contexts. The context for these writings is the turbulent politics of 'race' in the US in the interwar years and the emergence of a particular 'race'/class politics. The framing of the material in the book stresses those texts which are specifically concerned with finding connections between the plight of African Americans and those who suffer colonial oppression in order to emphasise the dialectical nature of anti-colonial struggle. The intention of many of these writers was to create a space for interracial class politics. Despite, or because of, the complexities of negotiating 'race', class and colonialism, this material gives us access to an historically specific attempt to create a 'race'/class politics attuned to the challenges of confronting racism of the USA and beyond.Key FeaturesIntroduces a powerful, but neglected, tradition of African American anti-colonial writingLocates African American anti-colonial writing of the interwar years in both a US and global contextStresses the dialectical nature of the relationship between anti-colonial politics and political activismReflects upon the relevance of interwar African American anti-colonial writings to contemporary debates about racism and neo-colonialismEmphasises the relationship between African American politics and the Left during this period"

This article is an exploration of the internationalist race/class politics of black Bolsheviks in the United States. It places those politics within the context of both the Comintern's anti-colonialism and the wider black radical tradition. Black communists and socialists living in
the US were highly attuned to both racialised pasts and the racialised present and this impacted on their particularly enthusiastic response to the October revolution and its aftermath. It argues that these writers, thinkers and activists inaugurated an ambitious and influential political
imaginary in which black workers were central to the dismantling of racial capitalism. Through an engagement with black socialist and communist publications of the period the article demonstrates that the Comintern's anti-colonial politics of liberation spoke to black experiences of class
exploitation and racial oppression and also to the established global imaginary of the black radical tradition. These transnational politics of solidarity had an impact both on forms of African American anti-racist class politics and on the Comintern's understanding of the politics of race
and class in the United States.

This article focuses on the impact of the Bolshevik revolution and Irish national liberation struggles on the black radical tradition in the US. Between 1919 and 1922, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) published a monthly journal, The Crusader, which attempted to forge a very specific race/class politics in the US. The Crusader shaped its powerfully articulated vision of black liberation through its trumpeting of the Russian revolution and the Irish anti-colonial struggle. If reparative history is a history which stresses the dialectical nature of 'race' and colonialism and the importance of recognising the agency of black subjects in transforming the politics of resistance, then the ABB is key to understanding the complex formations around race and class in the US in the early twentieth century.

During the Depression years of the early 1930s, the American Communist Party attracted significant numbers of black activists, writers and workers to its ranks. The black-led Communist paper the Liberator was both the mouthpiece and rallying point for this movement. The type of race-class politics it forged was groundbreaking at the time, but it has been consistently misunderstood and misconstrued by later historians, often writing from a 'cold war' perspective. Here, the development of the Liberator's politics is closely analysed and placed in a historical context that allows its significance for black radicalism and black struggle to emerge.

The reinvigoration of forms of white supremacy in the US and Europe has sharply delineated the connections between occluded racialised pasts and contemporary race politics in ways which make reparative history an urgent concern. This article argues that contemporary struggles over the politics of memorialisation telegraph more than a debate over contested histories. They are also signs of how the liberal narrative of 'trauma' and healing no longer suffices as a way of marginalising the history of radical black agency. Building on the research by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, the article focuses on the incendiary year of 1831 and on a moment of collision – between black resistance and white entitlement. It situates a hitherto overlooked aborted slave uprising in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, within its multiple radical Caribbean, Atlantic and British contexts as a way of disrupting the distance between histories confined to 'there' and those confined to 'here'. The article explores how the link between slavery and capitalism can be connected concretely to the black claim made on the nature of that emancipation as a way of further developing the concept of reparative history.

This article argues that the complex interactions of history, race, agency, memory and trauma are both essential to and negated by contemporary dominant understandings of racism in the US and Europe. The lethal racist policing of black communities in the US and the fanatical policing of national borders by the EU are richly and disturbingly redolent of the violent raced labour practices which have authorised capitalist modernity. Focusing on cultural representations such as The Wire and the United Nations' slavery memorial, 'The Ark of Return', the authors argue that the history of radical black agency is consistently marginalised in a very particular language of 'recovery' and 'healing'. The acknowledgement of historical crimes is mobilised in such a way as to neutralise the past and to negate the connections between that past and present structures which continue to exploit and vilify racialised subjects within the terms of neoliberal globalisation.

This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imagination during the long sixties. It decentres the conventional Western loci of this critical historical moment by instead foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles.