scholarly journals THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY'S PUBLISHING STRATEGIES AND THE FINANCIAL UNDERPINNINGS OF ACTIVISM, 1968–1975

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-217
Author(s):  
ANDREW M. FEARNLEY

AbstractHistorians of America's post-war social movements have said little about the financial underpinnings of activism, and this article aims to address this oversight. It focuses on the Black Panther Party, which was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966, and was soon one of America's most visible, and controversial, black power organizations. The article sketches the array of funding sources from which the party drew, and reconstructs the apparatus it fashioned to steward those resources. It condenses the discussion to one of the organization's most lucrative streams, that of book publishing, and relates this to the period's literary culture, which, in the US, witnessed a ‘black revolution in books’. Between 1968 and 1975, members of the party published some ten books, which together raised $250,000 in advances, and additional sums through their sale, serialization, and translation. The production of these works relied on the assistance of several freelance writers, and was guided by the party's commercial agency, Stronghold Consolidated Productions. By recovering the role of these groups and the infrastructure they fashioned, the article shows how publishing was connected to the wider financial structure of the organization, and prompts us to see that the Panthers’ books were not just accounts of their activism, but examples of it.

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Chris Rossdale

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6 (104)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Valery Yungblyud

The article is devoted to the study of various aspects of daily life of the US Embassy in Czechoslovakia in 1945—1948. The author considers the main areas of its work, major problems and difficulties that American diplomats had to overcome being in difficult conditions of the post-war economic recovery and international tension growth. Special attention is paid to the role of Ambassador L. A. Steinhardt, his methods of leadership, interactions with subordinates, with the Czechoslovak authorities and the State Department. This allows to reveal some new aspects of American diplomacy functioning, as well as to identify poorly explored factors that influenced American politics in Central Europe during the years when the Cold War was brewing and tensions between Moscow and Washington were rising. The article is based on unpublished primary sources from the American archives.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.


Author(s):  
A. Dolinkiy

Education exchanges are a key element of public diplomacy for most countries that considered effective in that domain of foreign policy activities. Education exchanges are attributed an important role in the post-war peace settlement between Germany and France and in determining the outcome of the Cold war. Relevant aspects of public diplomacy remain key elements of foreign policy instruments of the US, Germany and many other countries. Russia has been increasingly active in public diplomacy in the past decade and the role of education exchanges has been increasing which is also demonstrated by a growing number of expert publications on the subject. However the strategy, the quality of organization and the use of modern technologies remain at a relatively low level which leads to an inefficient use of resources. Priority issues that can be a core of Russia's public diplomacy (and foreign policy in general). Moreover, systemic work would be required to evaluate efficiency of current and complete projects which would allow determine effectiveness of programs and appropriateness of resources used. Education exchanges need to be targeted at both bringing international students to Russia and assisting Russian students to study internationally and professors to teach abroad. Finally, international best practices show that there is a need to maintain connections with international exchanges alumni and assist them to maintain connections with each other including with the use of modern technologies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Sam Beck

AbstractThe nature of capitalism in its neoliberal form is decreasing higher education’s exclusive domain of knowledge production by exposing students to and exploiting local knowledge production. This has created a paradox. Experiential learning is being supported as ‘academic’ because students learn skills, values and perspectives by engaging in communities of practice. Through community service learning and social justice oriented internships, students learn about emancipatory social movements while simultaneously providing their intellectual capital. Urban Semester Program students participate in the movement for affordable housing, with its origins in post-war Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where many Puerto Ricans settled. Engaged in a struggle against displacement, for self-determination and developing community sustainability by advocating and winning low and moderate income housing, residents are determined to remain in their neighbourhood. Students are engaged in this struggle and connect this exposure to their internships, and the globalising world economy, the role of the state, and corporate power.


2020 ◽  
pp. 242-268
Author(s):  
Amy Abugo Ongiri

Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.


2014 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 43-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Potorti

This chapter examines the role of food in the symbolic politics and practical agenda of the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in the late 1960s in Oakland, California.  Situating hunger and the politics of food at the center of drives for racial justice, it argues that the BPP’s anti-hunger efforts and food-centered campaigns were driven by an implicit understanding of the power of food in battles over racialized definitions of personhood, a forum for both enforcing and resisting hegemonic authority.  From this vantage, the Panthers and their allies in the East Bay community utilized the Party’s popular food programs, specifically its Free Breakfast for School Children Program, as staging grounds to prepare for a revolutionary overthrow of the socio-economic order.  In addition to strengthening the physical bodies of African Americans to ensure their “survival pending revolution,” the food programs served a deeper organizing function by encouraging community members to come together to meet an immediate, practical need and, in doing so, to visualize themselves as part of a larger movement for change.  The Panthers’ subsequent demands for consumer rights and calls for conscientious consumption (both as purchasers and eaters of food) highlighted the role of food politics in perpetuating racial injustice while demonstrating the capacity for food-related protest to challenge structures of hunger and patterns of widespread malnourishment.


2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOE STREET

This article examines forty years of historical writing on the Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that this historiography has now reached maturity. It evaluates key publications on the BPP, splitting the historiography into three periods. The first phase, the article asserts, was dominated by accounts written by participants and observers of the BPP in action. These offered insight into the personalities of the BPP leadership but included relatively little on other BPP members. They were supplemented by a collection of friendly academic studies, a number of which emphasized the role of the FBI in precipitating the BPP's decline. The article identifies the 1994 publication of Hugh Pearson's biographical study of Huey P. Newton as the beginning of a second phase. Pearson's work, which built on a collection of accounts written by observers and right-wing writers during the first phase, precipitated an outpouring of new studies that opposed its conclusions. These works overwhelmingly focussed on individual BPP chapters and the experiences of the BPP rank and file; they were generally friendly towards the party and often appraised the BPP's actions through the 1970s. A second wave of participant accounts also emerged in this period which offered a more personal interpretation of the BPP's decline. A third period emerged in the early 2000s that abandoned the obsession with Pearson's study and focussed instead on the BPP's contribution to African American and American culture beyond its political program and violent image. The article reveals the paradox at the heart of the local approach, one which recent studies addressed in their focus on the BPP's Oakland chapter and their return to a tight chronological approach that focussed on the BPP's peak years. It concludes by noting the remaining omissions in the BPP's historical record and anticipating further studies.


The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-548
Author(s):  
Michael Mastanduno

AbstractThe Trump administration has reversed a 70-year consensus and transformed both the substance of trade policy and the postwar role the US has played in its global management. It has also reconfigured the role of the president in the domestic trade policy process. Armed with the power and influence the US amassed during its long run as leader of the post-war liberal world economy, the Trump administration has used trade as its principle coercive weapon in foreign policy. It has achieved some success, albeit at high diplomatic cost and by putting at risk America’s long-standing structural advantages in the world economy. Given that domestic discontent with the liberal world economy has increased significantly, it is likely that the core aspects of Trump’s trade revolution will endure, even if subsequent administrations soften Trump’s provocative execution of it.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document