A Bibliography of Black Internationalism
Over the past several years, I have been conducting research for a book on black nationalism, radical politics, and internationalism during the twentieth century. Last year, I began co-editing a volume on black women’s internationalism with Tiffany M. Gill. Recently, a number of scholars and students have reached out to ask me for suggested readings on the topic. I have compiled a list of secondary works for those who are interested in learning more about the topic; or those who are looking for suggested readings to include in their course syllabi for next year. In an earlier post, I offer suggestions for how to teach black internationalism. The literature on black internationalism (or transnationalism) is extensive so this list is not meant to be exhaustive. Many of the works listed below explore women’s roles and the politics of gender in black internationalist movements. The majority of these works focus primarily on the twentieth century. Feel free to add your own suggestions to the comments section. *Last updated: January 24, 2016
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- Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013.
- Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- ———. Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
- Andrews, Gregg. Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2011.
- Austin, David. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Securities in Sixties Montreal. Montreal: Between the Lines Books, 2013.
- Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
- Blain, Keisha N. “‘For the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s,” Souls, Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2 (June 2015): 90-112.
- Byrd, Brandon. “To Start Something to Help These People: African American Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934,” Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2015): 127-153.
- Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
- Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
- Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Frazier, Robeson Taj. The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
- Gaines, Kevin. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill; the University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
- Gallicchio, Marc S. The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
- Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
- Guidry, Frank. Forging Diaspora: Afro Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
- Harold, Claudrena. The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942. New York: Routledge, 2007.
- Hine, Darlene Clark and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
- Ho, Fred, and Bill Mullen. Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
- Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: the Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
- ———. The End of Empires: African Americans and India. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
- James, C.L.R. (Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley). A History of Pan-African Revolt. Oakland: PM Press, 2012 [orig. 1938].
- James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America. London: Verso, 1998.
- Kearney, Reginald. African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
- Kelley, Robin D. G. “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950.” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–1077.
- Kelley, Robin D.G. and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 4 (1999): 6-41.
- Lemelle, Sidney and Robin D.G. Kelley, eds., Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora. London: Verso, 1994.
- Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
- Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
- Marable, Manning, and Vanessa Agard-Jones. Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
- ———. “‘For the Full Freedom of…Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States…’: Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International 1 (2012): 1-30.
- Meriwether, James. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- Mullen, Bill. Afro Orientalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
- Onishi, Yuichiro. Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa. New York: New York University, 2013.
- Perry, Kennetta Hammond. London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
- ———. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Polyne, Millery. From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan-Americanism, 1870-1964. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
- Prashad, Vijay. Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
- Putnam, Lara. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
- Ransby, Barbara. Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
- Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
- Slate, Nico. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
- Taylor, Ula. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
- Von Eschen, Penny. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
- ———. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- West, Michael O., William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins. From Toussaint to Tupac: the Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
- Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Excellent list, thanks for sharing this! I would add Sara E. Johnson’s The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas, and Anne Garland Mahler’s “Global South in the Belly of the Beast: Viewing African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens “, Latin American Research Review 50.1: 2015. It can be found here: Amerhttps://lasa.international.pitt.edu/LARR/prot/fulltext/vol50no1/50-1_95-116_mahler.pdf
Thanks for the reading recommendations! Actually, do you have any suggestions on African (American) sailors/Africans in early/golden-age-of-piracy (and later) maritime history I should check out? Or even books that have a section on them? I’ve read Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War by Martha S. Putney, Rediker’s works on sailors and pirates, and W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail. Any others I should check out? Can be from any era/region in history.
I wish I could help you out in this regard, alas, nothing comes to mind, except for Ada Ferrer’s new book, check it out.
Thanks so much for checking out my post!
Great suggestions, Kahil. A Chaos Fairy: I agree with Kahil. Check out Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Also, take a look at Julius S. Scott’s seminal work, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communications in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 1986); and some of the books on Paul Cuffee including Rosalind Cobb Wiggins’ Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters. It sounds like you are already off to a great start!
KNB
Good list. I would add Robinson’s *Black Marxism*; David Austin’s *Fear of a Black Nation*; C.L.R. James: *History of Pan-African Revolt*
Thanks, Paul. Great suggestions. I’ll add them to the list.
KNB
Gerald Horne’s Black Revolutionary, Plummer’s In Search of Power, And Perry’s Hubert Harrison should also be added… And of course my forthcoming dissertation. ?
Thanks so much! Yes, I agree. There are so many more amazing books that I could add to this list. And I look forward to reading your dissertation (and future book)!
Great resource. Perhaps add Claudrena N. Harold, *Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942* (Routledge, 2007)
Great book! Thanks so much.
Another one for the list:
Wu, Judy. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Thanks, Marketus. Great addition.
Here is another source for the list:
Slate, Nico, ed. Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
One of my favorites! Thank you! ~KNB
Here’s some possible additions to your wonderful compilation:
• Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., 1998.
• Adi, Hakim and Marika Sherwood. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited; with Colonial and…Coloured Unity (The Report of the 5th Pan-African Congress), George Padmore, ed. London: New Beacon Books, 3rd ed., 1995.
• Baptiste, Fitzroy and Rupert Lewis, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
• Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• Clemons, Michael L., ed. African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England, 2010.
• Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago, IL: Liberator Press, 1978.
• Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967.
• Lynch, Hollis R. Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs, 1937-1955. Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 1978.
• Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
• Plastas, Melissa. A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement. Syracuse. NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
Great list! Thanks for compiling. Of course, there are many other great works including, in the “shameless self-promotion” department, my own:
Peter Cole, “No Justice, No Ships Get Loaded: Political Boycotts on the Durban and San Francisco Bay Waterfronts,” International Review of Social History 58:2 (2013).