This is a transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. John Munro charts the emergence of an anticolonial front within the postwar Black liberation movement comprising organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture and leading figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O'Dell and C. L. R. James. Drawing on a diverse array of personal papers, organisational records, novels, newspapers and scholarly literatures, the book follows the fortunes of this political formation, recasting the Cold War in light of decolonisation and racial capitalism and the postwar history of the United States in light of global developments.

This book connects the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe.

Sociology, as a discipline, was born at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. Over a century later, it is yet to shake off its commitment to colonial ways of thinking. This book explores why, and how, sociology needs to be decolonized. It analyses how sociology was integral in reproducing the colonial order, as dominant sociologists constructed theories either assuming or proving the supposed barbarity and backwardness of colonized people. Ali Meghji reveals how colonialism continues to shape the discipline today, dominating both social theory and the practice of sociology, how exporting the Eurocentric sociological canon erased social theories from the Global South, and how sociologists continue to ignore the relevance of coloniality in their work. This guide will be necessary reading for any student or proponent of sociology. In opening up the work of other decolonial advocates and under-represented thinkers to readers, Meghji offers key suggestions for what teachers and students can do to decolonize sociology. With curriculum reform, innovative teaching and a critical awareness of these issues, it is possible to make sociology more equitable on a global scale.

Marshaling evidence from a wide array of international sources, including the black presses of the time, Penny M. Von Eschen offers a vivid portrayal of the African diaspora in its international heyday, from the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress to early cooperation with the United Nations. Tracing the relationship between transformations in anti-colonial politics and the history of the United States during its emergence as the dominant world power, she challenges bipolar Cold War paradigms. She documents the efforts of African-American political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists who forcefully promoted anti-colonial politics and critiqued U.S. foreign policy. The eclipse of anti-colonial politics—which Von Eschen traces through African-American responses to the early Cold War, U.S. government prosecution of black American anti-colonial activists, and State Department initiatives in Africa—marked a change in the very meaning of race and racism in America from historical and international issues to psychological and domestic ones. She concludes that the collision of anti-colonialism with Cold War liberalism illuminates conflicts central to the reshaping of America; the definition of political, economic, and civil rights; and the question of who, in America and across the globe, is to have access to these rights.

Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis presents research on contemporary forms of decolonization and anti-colonialism in practice. It pertains to the ways in which individuals, groups, and communities engage with the logic of epistemic colonial power within areas of citizenship, migration, education, Indigeneity, language, land struggle, and social work. The contributions in this edited volume empirically document the conceptual and bodily engagement of racialized and violated individuals and communities as they use anti-colonial principles to disrupt criminalizing institutional discourses and policies within various global imperial contexts. The terms ‘Decolonization’ and ‘Anti-colonialism’ are used in diverse and interdisciplinary academic perspectives. They are researched upon and elaborated in necessary ways in the theoretical literature, however, it is rare to see these principles employed in applied forms. Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis provides a much needed contemporary and representative reclamation of these concepts from the standpoint of racialized communities. It explores the frameworks and methods rooted in their indigeneity, cultural history and memories to imagine a new future. The research findings and methodological tools presented in this book will be of interdisciplinary interest to teachers, graduate students and researchers. Contributors are: Harriet Akanmori, Ayah Al Oballi, Sevgi Arslan, Jacqueline Benn-John, Lucy El-Sherif, Danielle Freitas, Pablo Isla Monsalve, Dionisio Nyaga, Hoda Samater, Rose Ann Torres, Umar Umangay, and Anila Zainub.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.