Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 244-258, June 2022.

Ida B. Wells (1862?1931) was a considerable figure in her day. But she has not been accorded posthumous acclaim in parallel. This oversight is either just, or an unprecedented historical falsification ? enabled largely through unhappy, gendered misperception. African?American thought for long turned round dispute between accommodation (Washington) and protest (Du Bois) as forms of leadership. Yet this contrast may mislead. First, Washington was more white placeman than black leader. Second, Du Bois, more than anyone, helped diminish, even extinguish, the (...) Wellsian intellectual legacy. If Wells?s arguments (on violence) have critical significance, and Washington?s are insubstantial and time?serving, then the important struggle within African?American leadership may come to be relocated within the protest tradition ? as between Du Bois (romantic Pan?Africanist) and Wells (universal defender of human rights), both recovered by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Wells possibly more fittingly. (shrink)

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay forStudies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the (...) younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto. (shrink)

Marcus Garvey stands as one of the most prominent figures in the articulation of what is known as the Pan-Africanist movement. Though born in colonial Jamaica, it was in the 1920s America that he assumed the stature as a thinker about the colonial problem. Among his extant writings, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the Africans is the one book or collection of articles and speeches which best articulates his post-colonial discourse. This postcolonial thought has of (...) late received the interest of critics like Rupert Lewis, Tony Sewell and Collin Grant. However, to date, as far as my knowledge goes, these critics have not tried to retrace directly or indirectly he Hegelian contours of his discourse though Hegel is known to have provided, inadvertently it must be said, the method for overturning the power relations for most postcolonial theorists. Nor have they, always according to the best of my knowledge, sought to explain how Garvey came to pattern the black man’s quest for national self-determination on Zionism. It is the purpose of the following article to do just that, i.e. show that Garvey’s imagined national state is patterned on Hegelian and Zionist templates. To this end I shall appeal to discourse analysis and historicist criticism as critical movements giving importance to both text and context. (shrink)