This chapter explores how Black youth in the British colony of Bermuda engaged decolonization, Black Power, and Black internationalism through Reggae, Dancehall, and sound system culture in the “global 1990s.” Centered on a racially charged 1995 referendum on independence in which, out of 58.8 percent of eligible voters, 73.6 percent voted against and 25.7 percent voted for independence, it argues that it is critical to explore Black anticolonialism through soundscapes and not just ballot politics, as Black Bermuda is a sonic culture. The era’s Reggae sound system clashes often invoked long-standing racial and colonial tensions, such as one between Bermuda’s Souljah One and British DJ David Rodigan. Through archives drawn from print media, government surveillance, and audio recordings, it shows that while sound system culture could not “free decolonization,” it played a crucial role in galvanizing the Black and working-class Progressive Labor Party’s youth base in its first political victory in 1998.

This chapter explores Claudia Jones’s poetics of carcerality and politics of Black internationalism, linking conventions of poetic form to an ever-growing collective of revolutionary women. Jones’s poetry proposes a remapping of diaspora as a circuit of solidarity between women workers and revolutionaries that stretches from Puerto Rico to West Virginia to China and Russia. The extensive corpus of writing about Jones has yet to focus its attention on her poetic devices, and in particular her crafting of rhyme, syntax, and stanza structure. This chapter thinks through some of the ways that poetic tropes and schemes not only emerge from and reflect conditions that might be called diasporic, but also present unique visions of south–south movement and radical responses in their own right. Jones’s poetry challenges transhistorical claims about what poetry is, claims that have sometimes been produced through classroom-based pedagogies and genealogies.

Part Two: “Ostracism/Initiation,” examines twentieth-century Japanese immigrants and their descendants in relation to structural anti-Blackness and its instantiation in a nationwide system of racial segregation and anti-Black violence. Entering the U.S. in the wake of Chinese exclusion, the Japanese inherited the mantle of the Asiatic/Mongolian, much to their dismay. Despite the pointed burdens associated this label, they discovered that the constitutive not-Blackness of the Asiatic/Mongolian also enabled their qualified and uneven advancement and mobility in an anti-Black order. This remained true even during the turbulent, traumatic events of the Second World War. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans constituted not only the extreme limit of their ostracism, but also, as others have noted, their symbolic initiation into the nation. As the Cold War unfolded, accounts of Japanese Americans as an ascendant “model minority” were just one symptom of how they came to be weaponized against the Black freedom struggle and in defense of the U.S. state and racial capitalism. Like the Chinese before them, Japanese Americans deployed their not-Blackness to their advantage in their efforts to achieve residential mobility, educational success, occupational advancement, and social assimilation in the postwar era.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.

Hughes did not travel in South America, and his contacts with fellow writers from the southern part of the hemisphere all began elsewhere, notably in Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. This chapter focuses on the circulation of the Spanish translations of Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic Americas and on the different literary and political personae that Spanish-language translators and journalists constructed for him. For some, Hughes was the race-man celebrated as the purported progenitor of black poetry in the Hispanic world. For others, he was the black Marxist who wrote poetry in the service of global revolutionary politics. While Hughes played both roles at different times in his career, his dedication to black internationalism would eventually prove untenable in the Hispanic Americas.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries.Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity.The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism.Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States.Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

Haiti had a singular importance in the life of Frederick Douglass. Like countless other African Americans, Douglass upheld the Haitian Revolution as an unprecedented blow for human rights. He appreciated the symbolism of Haiti, a self-identified Black nation-state. As an abolitionist, Douglass used his platform to call on the United States to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti and opine on the proposed mass emigration of African Americans from the United States to Haiti. He, after declining an opportunity to visit Haitiat the outset of the Civil War, eventually went there as a U.S. diplomat from 1889 to 1891. In Port-au-Prince, Douglass played a key role in a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Haiti. His experience in Haiti would not only lead to his appointment as one of Haiti’s representatives at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but also have a significant impact on his political thought.

This introductory chapter provides historical context for situating key developments in African American literature and culture at the turn into the twentieth century. In particular, this chapter examines the major shifts that happened in the immediate decade following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision to legalize racial segregation, showing how African American writers, artists, athletes, and intellectuals advocated for civil and political rights, even as they turned inward to strengthen and fortify the infrastructures of their own communities. Illuminating reasons why this decade still remains largely underappreciated in African American literary history, this chapter argues for attention to geography, genre, and publication circumstance, as inflected through questions of gender, sexuality, class, and the politics of race and representation, to bring to light new ways of reading these critical years at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This chapter identifies an alternative trajectory for tracing Alain Locke’s role in shaping the New Negro movement of the 1920s. As argued, Locke’s development as a theorist and architect of the New Negro movement can be traced back to the first decade of the twentieth century when Locke “swerved” away from the notion of the individual artist as “genius.” Locke found inspiration in Paul Laurence Dunbar, who himself had moved away from the notion of artist as genius to that of artist as “representative poet.” In particular, through this engagement with Dunbar, Locke formulated a notion of a race tradition rooted in intellectual influence and in the cultural and literary material that constitute an archive, which could stand in for an absent independent physical nation. This innovative notion laid the groundwork for the definition of the modern artist of the twentieth century, launching, in effect, a new theory of literature and the work that it does in the world.

Chapter 3 maps out the different ways in which black activists from both the United States and France employed culture as a method of demonstrating their contributions to Western modernity and as a means of thinking through the relationship between republicanism and race. It spans from the 1925 publication of Alain Locke’s ethnographic anthology, The New Negro, through to the establishment of the anti-reformist, revolutionary journal Légitime Défense in 1932. During this period, understandings of race were framed by France’s vogue nègre of les années folles and the American negrophilia of the roaring twenties. These two phenomena had in common a fetishized representation of black men and women in the literature and anthropology of both nations. Many black thinkers such as James Weldon Johnson embraced this enthusiasm, reasoning that attention to the race and opportunities for patronage would eventually lead to greater social equality, an evolution that would theoretically enforce equality before the law. Other commentators and activists such as Jane Nardal and Alain Locke instead advocated a more inclusive understanding of what it meant to be civilized and to be human. These debates played out through journals that are rarely studied in tandem, such as Challenge, La Revue du Monde Noir, Opportunity and La Dépêche Africaine, as well as through the publications and personal correspondence of intellectuals such as Paulette and Jane Nardal, Alain Locke, Clara Shepard and René Ménil.

This chapater considers the interplay between black political and cultural activists in Britain and the USA during the New Negro era and the creation of black internationalist networks as a subset of what the author calls the Black Bolshevik Renaissance. These networks significantly inflected the trajectory of black radicalism in the USA and the UK (and the Caribbean and Africa) from the New Negro Renaissance through the Popular Front era to the Black Arts and Black Power moment of the 1960s and 1970s. A significant focus here will be how this internationalism decentered notions of what we might now call a “Black Atlantic” or the “Atlantic World,” emphasizing building and strengthening the relationships of Africa and African Diasporic communities to non-European peoples in European and North American colonies and semi-colonies of “the East,” anticipating what many US Black political and cultural radicals would later term the “Bandung World.”

While the story of Caribbean literature in English generally focuses on its emergence in relation to Great Britain, Caribbean writers also urgently explored the Caribbean’s relationship to the United States. US imperialism in the region was most explicit with the US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War, in the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1910s to 1930s, and in its post-World War II involvement in various territories. Caribbean migration into the US fuelled the alliances that Brent Hayes Edwards describes as ‘the practice of diaspora’. In the 1920s, Caribbean activists and writers such as Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Eric Walrond helped shape the Harlem Renaissance. That movement’s aesthetic experiments and pan-African identifications inspired the development of literature within the region. The United States was also a hub from which some writers travelled to other parts of the world (Russia, France, the UK) and became part of a network of mutual influences. US writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston travelled to the Caribbean. Later, the ranks of the predominantly male writers in the United States were expanded with the emergence of women writers such as Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, and growing Caribbean immigration to the US coupled with the rise of US cultural institutions meant that the US location continued to influence Caribbean writing.

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, founder and president of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME) in Chicago, was a working-class black intellectual who advocated Afro-Asian solidarity during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a long tradition of black internationalism, she pursued an alliance with Japan in the years leading up to World War II. Her political vision, however, contradicted the ideas of mainstream black leaders of the period. Although Gordon had limited formal education she developed inventive strategies to communicate with her mostly working-class audience. Black nationalist women such as Gordon were the most ardent supporters of recruiting Japan as an ally, even if they disagreed on the concrete political projects that should underpin Afro-Asian solidarity. Gordon opposed black migration to Japan’s conquered territory of Manchuria, preferring a ‘return to Africa.’ In Gordon, readers encounter an organic intellectual with a distinct class position, who searched for practical ways for people of color to bring white empire to an end.

Earlier accounts of Eslanda Robeson have tended to focus on her stage-managing her husband’s career, minimizing her decision to go to Africa as an outcome of the breakdown of their marriage. Yet after the 1945 publication of African Journey Robeson became a household name among African American intellectuals, famous for her shrewd analyses of race and empire in the emerging Cold War. Building on recent work on the history of black international thought, this essay foregrounds Robeson’s journalism and involvement in internationalist and Pan-African networks. Robeson was an activist-intellectual whose international thought centered on the struggle for women’s participation and the significance of the so-called Third World. She astutely observed the limits of action imposed by international organizations. Committed to promoting women as political actors, Robeson nonetheless remained wedded to maternalist thinking. Yet, her widely read writings offered new representations of global politics to her readership, highlighting Robeson’s pedagogical commitment.