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Foreword
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ix Foreword ROBIN D. G. KELLEY “We, the soldiers of the national liberation front of America, in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country have struck a fatal blow to the racist police state!” So declared a young female revolutionary in the 1981 dystopian thriller Escape from New York, as she hijacked Air Force One with the president on board. The year is 1997. Manhattan had been turned into a maximum security prison, and our erstwhile rebel aims to bring the plane down on the beleaguered island so that the president can “perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.” Feeding off the revolutionary movements and political scandals of the 1970s, Escape from New York is a story of political corruption, empire, repression, rebellion, and the dark side of modernity. It anticipates the neoliberal security state, predicts a future that is now our present nightmare, and imagines a new generation who resists the status quo and recognizes that the real criminals are those in power. Although Minkah Makalani and Davarian L. Baldwin adopted the film’s title as a not-so-subtle critique of the New York–centric focus of studies on the “New Negro,” I suspect there is more being invoked here than meets the eye. The “New York” to which the film refers is not a city but a metaphor for the whole U.S. empire —its brutal, repressive regime, its racial character, its centrality to finance capital, its global reach. The dialectics of Empire also breeds its own gravediggers : movements that reject racial hierarchy, refuse victimization, and declare the humanity of the ruled while exposing the inhumanity of the rulers. Herein lies the book’s most critical insight, that is, that the New Negro was the product of a particular historical convergence—the expansion of U.S. and European empires, settler colonialism, an increasingly industrialized racial capitalism, and their attendant processes: expropriation, proletarianization, massive migration, urbanization, rapid technological development, and war. The New Negro, in other words, was not exceptional but a manifestation of the same forces that produced revolutionary upheavals in Mexico, Russia, Ireland, China, Germany, India, Algeria, Egypt, the Arab world under the Ottoman Empire, South Africa, x ROBIN D. G. KELLEY Nicaragua, Brazil, and Trinidad, to name but a few. From the green corn rebellion in Oklahoma to the Tuareg rebellion in Niger, from the workers and intellectuals in Turin, Italy, to the workers and intellectuals in republican Spain, the entire world was on the move in this period: demanding democracy, challenging social norms and laws defining appropriate behavior, fighting for the repossession of indigenous lands and rights, finding new modes of expression that reveal modern anxieties as well as the hidden world of the folk. These movements were diverse and distinctive, often at odds with one another or simply not in conversation. But they all were trying to come to terms with what it means to live as human in a modern, increasingly interconnected, rapidly industrializing capitalist world. Though military conscription, travel, and print capitalism helped catapult American New Negroes and their ideas around the world, the global character of the movement owes more to the global reach of Empire.1 The essays collected in Escape from New York are not escaping anything so much as placing the New Negro movement within a larger, global trajectory. As Baldwin points out in his deft introduction, the new scholarship explores in greater depth what the so-called New Negroes understood about their own historical epoch and their place in it. Alain Locke himself compared the New Negro movement with “those nascent movements of folk-expression and self-determination, which are playing a creative part in the world to-day. The galvanizing shocks and reactions of the last few years are making, by subtle processes of internal reorganization, a race out of its own disunited and apathetic elements. A race experience penetrated in this way invariably flowers. As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence of a people.”2 But Locke was only partly right. The New Negro represented a political expression , or better yet, expressions. As the essays here demonstrate, some New Negroes fought for fundamental rights and dignity within a constitutional framework. Others sought to “escape” from the United States, or the West altogether, and find a new promised land. And still others chose a third, more radical path. Rejecting both emigration and appeals for inclusion...