Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice

This book is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Quito Swan shows how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South.

Black Women's Internationalism: A New Frontier in Intellectual History

Published in Paris in 1928 under the leadership of Guadeloupean Maurice Satineau, the newspaper La dépêche africaine featured a mélange of African diasporic contributors from across the French colonies. Chief among them were the Afro-Martinican intellectuals and sisters Jane and Paulette Nardal. It was here that Jane Nardal published her now famous essay “Internationalisme noir,” introducing the idea of “black internationalism” into popular parlance. Nardal documented a new understanding of blackness and collectivity amid post-World War I globalization. Just as wartime had broken down barriers among Europeans and white Americans, so too had it fostered the “sentiment” among black people from the around the world that they “belong[ed] to one and the same race.” Introducing and reifying terms such as “Afro Latino” and “African American” into French and English vernaculars, Nardal focused on black people's efforts to rhetorically and ideologically link the African diaspora while also reconciling these new identities with the “ancient traditions” of Africa. The result: one of the first efforts to define black internationalism as an ideology, worldview, and political practice in a moment in which black people the world over were trying to negotiate the modernizing world and their place in it.