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McKay and Langston Hughes with ships and sailors’ noting that the intensity of these connections ‘lends additional support’ to Peter Linebaugh’s prescient suggestion that ‘the ship remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communication before the appearance of the long playing record’. 37 In this respect both Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s pioneering work of Atlantic working-class history ‘from below’ The Many Headed Hydra engage with and are animated by
, it opens up the possibility of them being ready to absorb and to view things in different ways in terms of what's being presented on the screen. For some people it even goes to the extent that they believe it more because it's a visual, audio-visual live presentation in some ways, and that means it has quite significant power at various times, so you can reach people, and I think that's important. (Interview with June Givanni, archivist, the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive, 20 October 2017
mothers and woman healers; others identified as womanists. 7 Those who did call themselves feminist often identified as such using additional adjectives such as African nationalist, postcolonial, pan-African, Marxist, socialist, black consciousness, environmentalist and queer. African feminist thinkers and historians of Africa have also deployed different ideas of the identities and statuses of women in precolonial and colonial pasts. 8
years he gravitated to a firebrand variant of marxism, to Pan-Africanism, and to a much deeper understanding of what was required to break the power of colonial authority. In part, this shift in allegiance was abetted by his reacquaintance with his old childhood friend, George Padmore, who was instrumental in piecing together a new conception of anti-colonialism, in which the historical resources of
was a powerful crucible for political ideas. Apart from the furies unleashed by the First World War not only in Europe but across the European empires, the period witnessed the rise of a host of political movements – from Marxism to fascism, from feminism to nationalism, from Pan-Africanism to Garveyism – and political experiments – from labour unions to Tammany Hall, from the Russian Revolution to
as Wood had rejected the idea earlier. Demands for independence had also emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as part of an articulate Marxist critique of Imperialism and as an integral part of Garvey’s pan-African vision. Similarly, individuals such as C. L. R. James 33 and overseas organisations such as the League of Coloured Peoples in Britain, and those established in the
English radicalism has been a deep-rooted but minority tradition in the political culture since at least the seventeenth century. The central aim of this book is to examine, in historical and political context, a range of key events and individuals that exemplify English radicalism in the twentieth century. This analysis is preceded by defining precisely what has constituted this tradition; and by the main outline of the development of the tradition from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Three of the main currents of English radicalism in the twentieth century have been the labour movement, the women’s movement and the peace movement. These are discussed in some detail, as a framework for the detailed consideration of ten key representative figures of the tradition in the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Ellen Wilkinson, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson, Michael Foot, Joan Maynard, Stuart Hall, Tony Benn and Nicolas Walter. The question of ‘agency’ – of how to bring about radical change in a predominantly conservative society and culture – has been a fundamental issue for English radicals. It is argued that, in the twentieth century, many of the important achievements in progressive politics have taken place in and through extra-parliamentary movements, as well as through formal political parties and organisations – the Labour Party and other socialist organisations – and on occasion, through libertarian and anarchist politics. The final chapter considers the continuing relevance of this political tradition in the early twenty-first century, and reviews its challenges and prospects.
, in literature, both English classics and literature by African writers, such as novels by Chinua Achebe, as well as African-American writers. He was well versed in many of the standard works of philosophy, and Pan-African political writings by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (see Biney in this volume) and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, as well as the struggles of African people in the diaspora, particularly American writers such as Malcolm X (see Daniels in this volume) and Martin Luther King Jr. Biko thus loved literature, poetry and philosophy. He wrote fluently. His was a
important injection of new blood and progressive thinking. This occurred especially through selling the idea of a Pan-African dimension and by bringing in the Organisation of African Unity (even if north Africa was excluded since it was embarking on separate accords with the Community). A particular task allotted to Foley was 140 EUD8 10/28/03 3:16 PM Page 141 The Commission and development policy selling the idea to the Nigerians, who had been suspicious, and the Pan-African ticket was one of his means. It was no longer simply something for former colonies, even if
commented on by the activist George Padmore, in an article from 1938, ‘Labour Unrest in Jamaica’. 27 In addition to critically publicising the strike wave that swept across the British Caribbean – which he also did in small notes published in the weekly newspapers, such as the Daily Herald , which Padmore later quoted himself – the 1938 article served to inform the local public, especially that linked to Pan-African circles and the London left, about the plight of the Jamaican population squeezed between an economy