Search results
This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
imperialism which was spearheaded by transnational party and union agitators and activists in various parts of the world. Ford’s exceptionality was similar to that of George Padmore and Otto Huiswoud, who were among the few Black transnational communist agitators to operate on a global scale, in their case being equivalent to the Black Atlantic. The class-against-class doctrine of the Comintern created space for inclusive, ‘colour-blind’ revolutionary activism but also constituted a dogmatic straitjacket which demarcated the
substantial commercial component.26 I am suggesting, then, that cultural study of black transnationalism could benefit from greater attention to the circuits of capital within and against which Africans and diasporic black peoples operated. Contemporary analysis of other diasporic communities and their transnational cultures – including Aihwa Ong’s work – has significantly foregrounded these economic structures and diasporic agency within them.27 Black Atlantic studies could also give greater attention to alliances that were primarily political rather than racial. As Robin
and anti-imperialist liberation struggles from South to North is also powerfully visible in black liberation movements of the period. The black transnational imagination had long transgressed the boundaries of the nation across the African diaspora. 23 Cynthia Young notes that in the sixties the black radical struggle in the US was ‘informed by the global’ where ‘an imagined black nation was produced in
explores the Afro-American, communist, labour union activist James W. Ford as one of the key global players in the history of interwar communism in the Black Atlantic. Weiss uses space in two intertwined ways. First, by tying together Ford’s activities in Chicago, Moscow, Hamburg and several other places, Weiss traces the vast agitation and propaganda network Ford helped produce, connecting Black activists in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. Second, Weiss shows how Ford was pushed and pulled from the centre of Black
and social club. Michelle Stephens ( 2005 , p. 14) draws from C. L. R. James’ work to discuss the homosocial “routes” transnational Caribbean intellectuals of the early twentieth century followed; they created “a black transnational community as black men travelling in colonial space in a common state of desiring, desiring freedom, language, community – and each other.” The
contingency and the plural forms of resistance that destabilise and decentre the left. Any international Marxist project and class project could thereby be faulted for the ‘appropriation of black bodies’ and for determining the ‘universal relevance’ of local conflicts. Marxism is thus for him a masculinist and colonialist discourse. 39 Gaines opts instead for a ‘black transnational network’ that cannot be associated with rights discourse or a specific political organisation and common economic condition, but that is understood rather as a ‘place of imagination where
diverse political trajectories shaped through such connections and relations, this book contributes to the burgeoning work on black transnationalism. The remainder of this section maps out some of the key interventions through which the volume adds to these debates in distinctive ways. Firstly, the volume is part of a body of a work that challenges a sense of Communism as an export which sprang fully formed from Europe and/or Russia. Rather, in line with a whole swathe of recent scholarship, we seek to be alive to the ways in