Preface
preface This project has its origins in a search for something we could not find: a single volume that offers a broad overview of the black international in time and space—from the late 1700s, the Age of Revolution, to the present, and on both banks of the Atlantic, west and east, from the Americas to Africa and points in between. The envisaged text would be grounded in the most recent and relevant sources, secondary and primary, and would at once attract the attentionofscholars ,teachers,students,andengagedintellectuals.Furthermore, thetext wouldcohere aroundthecentralthemeofblackinternationalismfrom theoutset,thatis,struggle.Toqualifyasblackinternationalist,thosestruggles, although situated mainly in specific localities, would have to be connected in some conscious way to an overarching notion of black liberation beyond any individual nation-state or colonial territory. That is to say, at the core of black internationalism is the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national,imperial,continental,oroceanicboundaries—orevenbyracialones. Sucharetheaimsofthisvolume.Theymakeforanambitiousgoal.Ourreaders will have to determine how much, or little, success we have had. Epistemically,thevolumemakesnoclaimtonovelty.Itssubject,thestoryof the black international, is as old as the black international itself. This narrative, as told by scholars, became more intellectually sophisticated and ideologically diverse in the early decades of the twentieth century. Black internationalism fared less well in the Western (or, for that matter, the African, Caribbean, or Latin American) academy in the post–World War II era, when regional area studies emerged as an intellectual handmaiden to the Cold War. Still, a hardy band of scholars, some within the academy (often in black studies and related ethnicstudiesprograms)andothersoutside,continuedtoproducescholarship on black internationalism during this period. The end of the Cold War, and with it a loosening of the hegemony of area studies, along with concomitant efforts to demarginalize ethnic studies, opened new prospects for scholarship on black internationalism. The resulting output, often presented under the label of African Diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, attests to the renaissance in the black international narrative. This is not the place to offer an accounting of preface xii this fine body of work. Perusal of the volume’s endnotes will, however, reveal our debt to the previous literature, the old as well as the new. What, then, is the rationale for this book? To begin, and as already noted, it tells, in a single volume, major aspects of the story of the black international, from the beginning to the present, that is, over a period spanning four different centuries (the eighteenth to the twenty-first). But that is just a beginning, albeit an important one. The volume is organized into three parts, plus an expansive introduction thatrangesfarbeyondasummaryoftheindividualchaptersandoffersaninterpretiveoverviewofblackinternationalismasawhole .Thefirstpartbreaksnew ground, recentering the U.S. and Haitian revolutions as epochal and foundational events in the making of the black international. Especially curious here is the Haitian case. Strange as it may seem, the black internationalist dimensions of the Haitian Revolution, so self-evident to contemporaries, has been woefully neglected by scholars (with a few notable exceptions), particularly in works produced since the end of World War II, including the most recent output. In the second part of the volume, we move forward in time more than a century, to the years following the end of World War I. By this point, the black international had expanded in space to include the African continent, an unintended consequence of the European conquests of the late nineteenth century. (Previously, only relatively small coastal areas of Africa, some of them populated by scions of returnees from the diaspora in the Americas and Europe , partook of black internationalism.) Among other things, the chapters in Part 2 highlight two well-known groups, the Garvey movement and the Communist International (the Comintern), which competed furiously to articulate and channel black grievances and aspirations on both banks of the Atlantic. Someofthematerialhere presented is new, fromboththegeographical(world areas covered) and documentary (archival sources) standpoints. Additionally the two movements, Garveyism and the Comintern, are seen to interface in unusual ways, and thus new interpretive vistas are opened. The main subject of Part 3 is Black Power, which is to say the rebirth of black internationalism in the 1960s, following the post–World War II struggles against colonialism and legalized racism on both banks of the Atlantic, the battle for decolonization and desegregation. As with many other black internationalist struggles, so also with Black Power: too often it is presented, whether implicitly or explicitly, as a singular movement, specific to this or that nation-state. The chapters in Part 3, on the contrary, show not just the wide...
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