Pan Africanist Letters: the historical development of political thought in the PAC of Azania, 1959 to 1993

<p>This paper maps some of the notable influences on the evolution of Pan Africanism in South Africa with reference to the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). It does so by exploring the history of the ideas of the PAC founded on the 6^th of April in 1959. The interrelated questions explored are: Is there a tradition of Africanist thought intrinsically linked to the birth of the PAC as a liberation movement in South Africa? What are the lineages of the PAC’s intellectual traditions? Given the PAC’s short history as a legal political formation before it was banned in 1960, is there a tradition of ideas to reflect upon? What are the roots of these ideas, firstly, as manifest in there framing by liberation movements of the wars of resistance against colonial conquestas intrinsically linked to new 20^th century struggles for national liberation? Secondly, how did these ideas manifest in the anti-colonial struggle’s further development or transmutation into early freedom struggles as articulated by the emergent African intelligentsia particularly after the Second World War? Thirdly, what was the influence on the PAC by other African independence struggles, particularly the independence of Ghana in 1957. And fourthly, is there a tradition of Africanist thought in the anti-colonial struggle’s global connections and the intricacies and challenges posed by the exile experiences of the PAC from 1960 to 1993.</p>

Pan Africanist Letters: the historical development of political thought in the PAC of Azania, 1959 to 1993

<p>This paper maps some of the notable influences on the evolution of Pan Africanism in South Africa with reference to the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). It does so by exploring the history of the ideas of the PAC founded on the 6^th of April in 1959. The interrelated questions explored are: Is there a tradition of Africanist thought intrinsically linked to the birth of the PAC as a liberation movement in South Africa? What are the lineages of the PAC’s intellectual traditions? Given the PAC’s short history as a legal political formation before it was banned in 1960, is there a tradition of ideas to reflect upon? What are the roots of these ideas, firstly, as manifest in there framing by liberation movements of the wars of resistance against colonial conquestas intrinsically linked to new 20^th century struggles for national liberation? Secondly, how did these ideas manifest in the anti-colonial struggle’s further development or transmutation into early freedom struggles as articulated by the emergent African intelligentsia particularly after the Second World War? Thirdly, what was the influence on the PAC by other African independence struggles, particularly the independence of Ghana in 1957. And fourthly, is there a tradition of Africanist thought in the anti-colonial struggle’s global connections and the intricacies and challenges posed by the exile experiences of the PAC from 1960 to 1993.</p>

Divisions

Divisions examines racism and resistance in America’s World War II military. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them, involving every imaginable aspect of military life. Who served? Who fought? Who died? Who gave orders and who was forced to follow them? Who received the best ratings and jobs and pay and promotions? Who was court-martialed? Who received furloughs and leaves? Who received honorable or dishonorable discharges? Who ate at the officers’ club? Who danced at the post’s main recreation center? Who drank at the best pub in Cherbourg, France, or swam in the nicest pool in Calcutta? Color lines, which divided American troops in various configurations, often spoke definitively in all these matters and more. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy and of African American, Japanese American, and other nonwhite subordination. Varied freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the postwar stage for its desegregation and for the flowering of civil rights movements beyond. But the costs of the military’s color lines were devastating. They impeded America’s war effort, undermined the nation’s Four Freedoms rhetoric, traumatized, even killed, an unknowable number of nonwhite troops, further naturalized the very concept of race, deepened many whites’ investments in white supremacy, especially anti-black racism, and further fractured the American people.

African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s

This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya’s second vice-president. It follows Murumbi’s engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his vision for community development and the practical coordination of internationalism; in London he pushed British activists to take a more internationalist approach to anti-colonialism in a case of ‘reverse tutelage’; disillusioned with the British Left, in Scandinavia and Israel he questioned the translatability of community development and the practical role of external sympathisers as Kenyan independence approached. Murumbi’s trajectory confirms the inseparability of internationalism and nationalism in 1950s Africa, reinserting internationalist thought into narratives of Kenyan freedom struggles and suggesting how alternative visions for post-colonial Kenya were lost. Moreover, we argue, this reassessment of Murumbi’s life advances the burgeoning scholarship on internationalisms in the decolonising world by showing that Murumbi’s internationalist practices and his interest in the supposedly ‘local’ question of community development drove one another. Murumbi thus shows us a particular set of entanglements between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’.

Some Psychological Implications of Black Struggle

Yet another long, hot summer in 2020 brought to the broader consciousness—in the US and well beyond—what Black folks have known for centuries about the ways in which racial hegemony relies on the acute violence of a police knee on a prone neck and the chronic violence of prisons, prefects, and (public housing) projects (for discussions, see Bulhan 1985; Omi and Winant 2014; Sidanius and Pratto 1999). In their commentary, AK Thompson makes too many important points for us to address in this brief commentary. Thus, as research psychologists with a transdisciplinary social-behavioral approach to protest, resistance, and societal change, we focus on what we see as Thompson’s most psychologically oriented theses: II, III, V, and VI. In sum, we see Thompson as arguing that social movements necessarily include a (more or less latent) threat of violence (II) and that this violence is noticed and suppressed because it challenges (III) the logic (economic, political, and cultural), the ethics, and the formalization (legal, political, and institutional) of racial hegemony (V). In addition, we take Thompson to argue that Black freedom struggles are, and have always been, flexible in means and aims (VI), adjusting strategically to the multifaceted dynamics of oppression and resistance.

Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory

This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.

Violence, Social Movements, and Black Freedom Struggles

George Floyd’s murder by police on 26 May 2020 set off a cycle of struggle that was notable for its size, intensity, and rate of diffusion. Starting in Minneapolis, the uprising quickly spread to dozens of other major cities and brought with it a repertoire that included riots, arson, and looting. In many places, these tactics coexisted with more familiar actions like public assemblies and mass marches; however, the inflection these tactics gave to the cycle of contention is not easily reconciled with the protest repertoire most frequently mobilized during movement campaigns in the United States today. This discrepancy has led to extensive commentary by scholars and movement participants, who have often weighed in by considering the moral and strategic efficacy of the chosen tactics. Such considerations should not be discounted. Nevertheless, I argue that both the dynamics of contention witnessed during the uprising and their ambivalent relationship to the established protest repertoire must first be understood in historical terms. By considering the relationship between violence, social movements, and Black freedom struggles in this way, I argue that scholars can develop a better understanding of current events while anticipating how the dynamics of contention are likely to develop going forward. Being attentive to these dynamics should in turn inform our research agendas, and it is with this aim in mind that I offer the following ten theses.

Fugitive State

This essay engages the activism of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau, along with Black feminist cultural productions such as the 2019 song “Almeda” by Solange and Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen and Slim, to offer a cimarrona approach for practicing Florida study. The cimarrona is a rebellious being who can lead us to apply a radical lens for understanding life, freedom struggles, and death in Florida—one that underscores the refusal of Blackness, which we can understand as a form of fugitivity. I argue that these Black feminist works evoke Florida as a Black Atlantic site and freedom route.