Black Nationalism In American Politics And Thought

Revisits the arguments supporting separate black statehood from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour. While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.

This comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship of black political thought identifies which political ideologies are supported by blacks, then traces their historical roots and examines their effects on black public opinion.

A unique collection of articles and speeches by prominent African American activists, spanning over 150 years of black political thought.

A complex portrait of contemporary black political stances Black Nationalism is one of the oldest and most enduring ideological constructs developed by African Americans to make sense of their social and political worlds. In Dreaming Blackness, Melanye T. Price explores the current understandings of Black Nationalism among African Americans, providing a balanced and critical view of today’s black political agenda. She argues that Black Nationalism continues to enjoy moderate levels of support by most black citizens but has a more difficult time gaining a larger stronghold because of increasing diversity among blacks and a growing emphasis on individualism over collective struggle. She shows that black interests are a dynamic negotiation among various interested groups and suggests that those differences are not just important for the "black agenda" but also for how African Americans think and dialogue about black political questions daily. Using a mix of everyday talk and impressive statistical data to explain contemporary black opinions, Price highlights the ways in which Black Nationalism works in a "post-racial" society. Ultimately, Price offers a multilayered portrait of African American political opinions, providing a new understanding of race specific ideological views and their impact on African Americans, persuasively illustrating that Black Nationalism is an ideology that scholars and politicians should not dismiss.

The Black community has historically suffered stasis on the political level. W.E.B. Du Bois originally identified the source of the stasis as a contradiction of political goals within individuals and Black culture. During the last century, the development of African American political organizations has institutionalized this «contradiction of double aims». That institutionalization is largely due to the energy and resources of two distinct and often contradicting political traditions - Black nationalism and the Black American Jeremiad. It is within a third tradition, Black cultural pluralism, that a possible discourse exists that can address the stasis within the Black community. This book attempts to reconstruct the development of this third tradition and posits it as the most viable source of Black political development.

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

Classical Black Nationalism traces the evolution of black nationalist thought through several phases, from its "proto-nationalistic" phase in the late 1700s through a hiatus in the 1830s, through its flourishing in the 1850s, its eventual eclipse in the 1870s, and its resurgence in the Garvey movement of the 1920s. Moses incorporates a wide range of black nationalist perspectives, including African American capitalists Paul Cuffe and James Forten, Robert Alexander Young from his "Ethiopian Manifesto", and more well-known voices such as those of Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others.