Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers by Holger Weiss (review)

This book is a result of assiduous research, primarily in the archives of the Communist International (Comintern), in the former Soviet Union. Holger Weiss, a historian at the Abo Akademi University in Finland, traces the Comintern's engagement with black radicalism, especially through the medium of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). The work meticulously traces the first black Communist activists, English-speaking Afro-Caribbean migrants in the United States, who became the core of black Comintern cadres. The study then proceeds to examine early Comintern attempts to recruit followers in West Africa, a task made difficult not only by the fact that most of Africa was under European colonization at the time but that the African labor movement was still in its birth stages, as well as the fact that few Communists had experience in Africa.

The study then focuses on the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928), which paid considerable attention to the "Negro question," particularly in its declaration that black people in the United States formed an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination (independence). Out of these efforts, the ITUCNW was founded, and Weiss examines the work of this organization; until the Nazis came to power in 1933, it was headquartered in Hamburg and led by George Padmore, a Trinidad-born activist who (under his birth name Malcolm Nurse) joined the American Communist Party in 1927 as a student at Howard University. After paying considerable attention to Padmore's time as the leading black Communist, Weiss then focuses on Otto Huiswoud, the Suriname-born charter member of the American Communist Party, who became head of the ITUCNW after Padmore broke from the Comintern in 1934. Weiss follows this until the ITUCNW was dissolved in 1938.

This brief summary does not do justice to Framing a Radical African Atlantic, which analyzes this Communist work in considerable detail, based on a close reading of the Comintern archives (which are in various languages). This detail is both the book's key strength and its main failing. From a positive standpoint, the book's almost encyclopedic attention to the day-to-day work of the ITUCNW will be invaluable for specialists. It is hard to imagine future historians researching Communist activities among black Americans, Africans in Europe, or in Africa without consulting Weiss's work. At the same time, amid such information, the book often seems to lack an overarching narrative that would make it more readable. Often Weiss pays considerable attention to the details of organizational work, with little attempt to argue why this is significant. At times, it appears that Weiss was seduced by his sources: the book on occasion seems to emphasize hermeneutics and exegesis over using the documents to support an argument. Again, for the specialist who is familiar with much of the documentation, this is invaluable. At the same time, for the nonspecialist, the book's very detail makes it harder to consult. At times one gets the sense that Weiss would have been happier editing a collection of Comintern documents instead of a standalone history.

Besides helping to bulk up the book (and its price), this approach obscures the broader political and historical context. The reader is often left thinking that the book, while dealing extensively with Communist efforts to organize among people of African descent, does not analyze in sufficient depth the Communist politics, especially how the "Negro Question" fit into the broader Communist program. Weiss asserts that "the communists—be it in Moscow or among the white leadership of the CPUSA—never regarded race to be a crucial issue. On the contrary, according to communist vocabulary, the 'Negro Question' was first and foremost a class question" (140). As the present reviewer (and others) have argued, while the traditional American Socialist position...