Imagining Home Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora

by Lemelle, Sidney J.; Kelley, Robin D.G.

• ISBN13: 9780860915850
• ISBN10: 0860915859
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-12-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book’s overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped.

Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought—including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic.

Author Biography

Sidney J. Lemelle is Professor of History and Black Studies and Chair of History at Pomona College.

Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of South California.

Paul Buhle,formerly a senior lecturer at Brown University, produces radical comics. He founded the SDS Journal Radical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Madison.

Paul Gilroy is Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Table of Contents

Introduction : Imagining Home: Pan-Africanism Revisited	p. 1
The Cultural Politics of Pan-Africanism	p. 17
'What Is Africa to Me?': African Strategies in the Harlem Renaissance	p. 19
'Afric's Sons with Banner Red': African-American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934	p. 35
Pan-Africanism, Feminism and Culture	p. 55
Rastafarians and Ethiopianism	p. 66
Renewed Traditions: Countrapuntal Voices in Haitian Social Organization	p. 85
Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a Changing Same	p. 93
Contradictory Legacy: Black Intellectuals and Pan-Africanism	p. 119
Pan-Africanism as Process: Adelaide Casely Hayford, Garveyism, and the Cultural Roots of Nationalism	p. 121
W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Sovereignty	p. 145
C.L.R. James: Paradoxical Pan-Africanist	p. 158
Writers and Assassinations	p. 167
Max Yergan and South Africa: A Transatlantic Interaction	p. 185
Southern Africa and the United States: Towards the Twenty-First Century	p. 207
Apartheid and the U.S. South	p. 209
Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Education: Towards a New Understanding	p. 222
Pan-Africanism and Apartheid: African-American Influence on US Foreign Policy	p. 243
Theory of Liberation, or Liberation from Theory?: Rethinking Pan-Africanism	p. 283
Pan-Africanism and African Liberation	p. 285
Pan-Africanism or Classical African Marxism?	p. 308
The Politics of Cultural Existence: Pan-Africanism, Historical Materialism and Afrocentricity	p. 331
Appendix A The Seventh Pan-African Congress: Notes from North American Delegates	p. 351
Appendix B Resist Recolonisation!: General Declaration by the Delegates and Participants at the 7th Pan-African Congress	p. 361
Contributors	p. 367
Index	p. 370
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.