from toussaint to tupac from toussaint to tupac The Black International since the Age of Revolution edited by michael o. west, william g. martin, & fanon che wilkins The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill Marc D. Perry’s essay ©2009 The University of North Carolina Press appeared previously in All rights reserved different form as “Global Designed by Rebecca Evans Black Self-Fashionings: Set in Arno Pro and Seria Sans by Rebecca Evans Hip Hop as Diasporic Manufactured in the United States of America Space,” Identities 15, The paper in this book meets theguidelines for permanence no. 6 (December 2008) and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for (http://www.informaworld Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. .com), and is reprinted The University of North Carolina Press has been a member here with permission. of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From Toussaint to Tupac : the Black international since the age of revolution / edited by Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins.1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3309-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8078-5972-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African diaspora. 2. BlacksPolitics and government. 3. InternationalismHistory. 4. BlacksIntellectual life. 5. Black powerHistory. I. West, Michael O. (Michael Oliver) II. Martin, William G., 1952 – III. Wilkins, Fanon Che. DT16.5.F766 2009 320.54v6dc22 2009003100 cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1 paper131211100954321 for the next generation of students of global africa This page intentionally left blank contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xv introduction Contours of the Black International From Toussaint to Tupac 1 michael o. west & william g. martin part 1 The American Revolution and the Creation of a Global African World 47 sylvia frey Haiti, I’m Sorry The Haitian Revolution and the Forging of the Black International 72 michael o. west & william g. martin part 2 Nothing Matters but Color Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International 107 lara putnam Providential Design American Negroes and Garveyism in South Africa 130 robert vinson The Negro Question The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years 155 hakim adi part 3 Waiting for the Black Gandhi Satyagraha and Black Internationalism 179 vijay prashad The Rise and Fall of Caribbean Black Power 197 brian meeks Merely One Link in the Worldwide Revolution Internationalism, State Repression, and the Black Panther Party, 1966–1972 215 robyn spencer Hip Hop’s Diasporic Landscapes of Blackness 232 marc d. perry Bibliography 259 About the Authors 299 Index 303 illustrations Queen Mother Moore xviii General Toussaint Louverture 45 Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson 105 Tupac Shakur 177 This page intentionally left blank 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 spacefrom 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 at- tention of scholars, teachers, students, and engaged intellectuals. Furthermore, the text would cohere around the central theme of black internationalism from the outset, that is, struggle. To qualify as black internationalist, those struggles, 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, or oceanic boundariesor even by racial ones. Such are the aims of this volume. They make for an ambitious goal. Our readers will have to determine how much, or little, success we have had. Epistemically, the volume makes no claim to novelty. Its subject, the story of 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 ethnic studies programs) and others outside, continued to produce scholarship 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 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. xii 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 differ- ent centuries (the eighteenth to the twenty-first). But that is just a beginning, preface albeit an important one. The volume is organized into three parts, plus an expansive introduction that ranges far beyond a summary of the individual chapters and offers an inter- pretive overview of black internationalism as a whole. The first part breaks new ground, recentering the U.S. and Haitian revolutions as epochal and founda- tional events in the making of the black international. Especially curious here is the Haitian case. Strange as it may seem, the black internationalist dimen- sions 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 Eu- rope, partook of black internationalism.) Among other things, the chapters in Part 2 highlight two well-known groups, the Garvey movement and the Com- munist International (the Comintern), which competed furiously to articulate and channel black grievances and aspirations on both banks of the Atlantic. Some of the material here presented is new, from both the geographical (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 strug- gles 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 spatial range of Black Power but also the global interlocution it set in train. This section includes, too, discussions of Black Power’s transnational and transracial antecedents, and of hip hop, a movement that, at least in its origins, claims xiii ideological descent from Black Power. preface Such, we contend, are the claims and achievements of this volume. It is offered as an installment in the ongoing narrative of the black international, in the hope that it will stimulate further discussion, research, and production. This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments As editors, our greatest debt is to our contributing authors, who have waited entirely too long for this project to come to fruition. In some small way, we hope, their patience and forbearance have been rewarded. As editors and au- thors, we could not have asked for more diligent and searching manuscript re- viewers than those chosen by the press. Their thorough and thought-provoking reports pinpointed omissions, uncovered errors of both fact and interpreta- tion, and forced us to rethink many of our assumptions. The reviewers, later revealed to be Lisa Brock and Komozi Woodard, helped to make this a better volume. We remain in their debt. Indeed, Professor Woodard went so far as to convene a workshop, “The Black International: The Haitian Revolution to the Black Consciousness Movement.” Held at his institution, Sarah Lawrence College, the workshop was inspired by this volume. Greater solidarity hath few in the academy. We are grateful, too, to our editor, David Perry. From our first substantive encounter, at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Birmingham, Alabama, David posed a series of critical questions that helped to frame the volume. David’s assistant, Zachary Read, has proven to be a wonder- ful conduit and invaluable resource in his own right. We also give thanks to Stephanie Wenzel for splendid work as project editor, to Margie Towery for indexing, to Mary Caviness for proofreading, and to Ravi Palat for moral and material support.