In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Introduction
  • Arthur Versluis

This issue of JSR features three articles on various aspects of African American radicalism in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The main articles in this issue arrived over a period of several years and together represent a thematic focus for the issue on African American radicalism before, during, and after the turbulent 1960s. But in it, we also continue the focus from the previous issue on the European New Right and, in particular, on the French Nouvelle Droite, following on the previous issue, JSR 8.1.

Our first article, Denise Lynn’s “Socialist Feminism and Triple Oppression: Claudia Jones and African-American Women in American Communism,” looks at the understudied figure of Claudia Jones in relation to Black Nationalism and the American Communist Party movement. Both this article and our second article, Dawn Flood’s on Black Panther activist Fred Hampton’s visit to Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1969, explore from different perspectives the sometimes complex relationships between these figures and the differing goals of diverse radical or leftist movements. Feminism, communism, and African American radicalisms all intersected in some respects but diverged in others. Through the different lenses of these scholars, we see that these various forms of radicalisms on the left were more complicated and to some extent even more in conflict than one might have thought.

The third article in this issue is Amy Washburn’s on the Black Panther Party activist and poet Ericka Huggins, who is now teaching women’s [End Page v] studies at California State University, East Bay. Huggins was imprisoned during the period 1969 to 1972, during which she wrote poetry, which Washburn sympathetically details and explicates in this article. Washburn writes, approvingly citing Huggins, that “Many working-class/and/or poor women of color are prisoners in white-supremacist patriarchal capitalist societies.” When Washburn writes about Huggins’s opposition to “white-supremacist patriarchal capitalist societies” and about the “martyrdom” of its opponents, one cannot distinguish much between the author’s and the subject’s views. The significance of this observation will become apparent soon.

And this issue includes five book reviews, many of them thematically linked with the articles. For instance, we have Bill Mullen’s review of We Shall Be Free! Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices (2013), Ronald Kuykendall’s review of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. (2013), as well as Alex Khasnabish’s reflections on Lesley Wood’s Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion (2012), in which he considers this book’s contribution to “scholar-activist” studies of the anti-globalization protest movement. And we include Christopher Coffman’s review of John Borgonovo’s The Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork City, 1916–1918 (2013) and Alan Wald’s review of Matthew Levin’s Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (2013). Broadly, these reviews highlight the continuing development of scholarship in the field of radicalism studies—we have many more reviews in process and have had to be selective in terms of the titles we highlight.

In this issue, we also feature our conversation with Alain de Benoist, the founding and leading figure of the French New Right. The interview includes de Benoist’s response to Tamir Bar-On, who in turn was responding to de Benoist’s “Answer to Tamir Bar-On,” which was published in the last issue in a new section called Dossier, ending the issue that began with Bar-On’s original article. This dialogic chain of reactions is probably unprecedented, first, because we have (in the previous issue) the highly critical response to a scholarly article by the actual figure being discussed in the article and, second, because in this issue we have more or less an outright denunciation by the scholar of his subject. We included both responses in a new section, Dossier, because they are not conventional articles, [End Page vi] and we included our conversation with Alain de Benoist in the usual place in the issue for such conversations, even though he is, in fact, in part responding directly to the critical assault by Tamir Bar...

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