Insurgent Empire
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123. Langston Hughes, ‘Always the Same’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 427.
124. Cunard, ‘Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary’, in Maureen Moyhagh, ed., Essays on Race and Empire (Calgary: Broadview, 2002), p. 195.
125. Cited in Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, p. 192, and Hugh Ford, ‘Introduction’, in Cunard, Negro, p. xvii.
126. For a fuller account of the contents of the anthology, see ‘Coda’, in Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.
127. Cited in Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Introduction’, in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, transl. Joan Pinkham, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), pp. 25–6.
128. ‘Curating Art, Rewriting World History’, in Champion and Goloubeva, Ethics and Poetics, p. 275.
129. Ibid., p. 276.
130. Friedman, ‘Introduction’, in Friedman, ed., Beckett in Black and Red, p. xxxi.
131. Raymond Michelet, ‘Nancy Cunard’, in Hugh Ford, ed., Nancy Cunard, p. 128.
132. Kalliney, ‘Cunard, Hughes, McKay, Pound’, p. 73.
133. Nancy Cunard, foreword to Cunard, Negro, p. iv.
134. Ford, ‘Introduction’, p. xii.
135. Ibid., p. xiii–xiv.
136. Edwards, Practice of Diaspora.
137. Cunard, ‘Foreword’, p. iii.
138. Ibid., p. iii.
139. Ibid., p. iv.
140. Ibid., p. iii.
141. Ibid.
142. Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos, 175.
143. Ibid., p. iv.
144. Langston Hughes, introduction to Cunard, Negro, p. 4.
145. Taylor Gordon, ‘Malicious Lies Magnifying the Truth’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 79.
146. Ibid., p. 80.
147. John Frederick Matheus, ‘Some Aspects of the Negro Interpreted in Contemporary American and European Literature’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 108.
148. ‘Nat Turner – Revolutionist’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 14.
149. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, ‘Black America’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 149.
150. Ibid., p. 150.
151. Ibid., p. 150.
152. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), p. 104.
153. Nancy Cunard, ‘A Reactionary Negro Organisation’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 146, emphasis in original.
154. James W. Ford, ‘Communism and the Negro’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 281.
155. Ibid., p. 284.
156. Ibid.
157. Ibid.
158. Nancy Cunard, ‘Jamaica – the Negro Island’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 449, emphasis in original.
159. Nancy Cunard, ‘The Colour Bar’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 552.
160. Ibid., p. 554.
161. George Padmore, ‘Race Prejudice in England’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 555.
162. Ibid.
163. George Padmore, ‘Ethiopia Today: The Making of a Modern State’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 612.
164. Ibid., p. 613.
165. Ben. N. Azikiwe, ‘Liberia: Slave or Free?’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 780.
166. Ibid., p. 781.
167. Ibid., p. 783.
168. George S. Schuyler, ‘Black Civilisation and White’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 785.
169. Ibid., p. 785.
170. Johnstone Kenyatta, ‘Kenya’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 805.
171. The Surrealist Group in Paris, ‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, transl. Samuel Beckett, in Cunard, Negro, p. 574. Signatories included André Breton, Roger Caillois and René Crevel.
172. T. K. Utchay, ‘White-Manning in West Africa’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 762.
173. Ibid.
174. Ibid., p. 765.
175. Ibid.
176. Ibid.
177. Raymond Michelet, ‘African Empires and Civilisations’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 598.
178. Michelet, ‘ “Primitive” Life and Mentality’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 739.
179. Ibid.
180. Ibid.
181. Ibid., p. 740.
182. Ibid.
183. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 56.
184. Michelet, ‘ “Primitive” Life and Mentality’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 740.
185. Ibid.
186. Ibid., p. 742.
187. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 69.
188. Michelet, ‘ “Primitive” Life and Mentality’, p. 745, emphasis in original.
189. Ibid., p. 746
190. Ibid., p. 747.
191. Ibid., 761.
192. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, transl. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 125.
193. Raymond Michelet, ‘The White Man Is Killing Africa’, in Cunard, Negro, p. 839.
194. For a more extended discussion of the Cunard–McKay exchange on the question of payment, see Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters. It is difficult not to sympathize with both parties in this case: the black writer in straitened circumstances who insisted on his right to remuneration; the disinherited white woman editor who was working with no budget to speak of for what she saw as a vital political project, though also no doubt operating within an aristocratic model of prestige and patronage, as McKay suggested.
195. McKay to Nancy Cunard, 25 January 1933, HRC 17.1.
196. Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘The Fascist World War’, in Kathryn Dodd, ed., A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 215. First published in New Times and Ethiopia News, 1 August 1936.
197. Cited in Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst, 100.
198. Ibid., p. 111.
199. Nancy Cunard, untitled, HRC 8.6.
200. Ibid.
201. Ibid.
202. Cited in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, p. 374.
203. McKay to Cunard, 20 August 1932, HRC 17.1; Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, p. 222.
8. Internationalizing African Opinion
1. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1957), p. 27.
2. Ibid.
3. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 246.
4. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 194.
5. Christian Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain (London/Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 9.
6. Roderick J. Macdonald, ‘ “The Wisers Who Are Far Away”: The Role of London’s Black Press in the 1930s and 1940s’, in Jagdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield, eds, Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), p. 151. Black-run journals included The Keys, issued by the moderate organization the League of Coloured Peoples, while the New Times and Ethiopia News, edited by Pankhurst, had a significant number of black contributors.
7. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 212.
8. ‘Editorial: An Open Letter to West Indian Intellectuals’, International African Opinion 1: 7 (May–June 1939).
9. Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist, and Mrs Marcus Garvey No.1; or, a Tale of Two Amys (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 2007), p. 143.
10. Ibid.
11. Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 9–10.
12. Bill Schwarz, ‘George Padmore’, in Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 138. Schwarz’s description here is specifically of Padmore’s work.
13. Wilder is succinct and elegant on this point, noting of Césaire and Senghor among others: ‘These black thinkers also produced important abstract and general propositions about life, humanity, history, and the world’. Wilder, Freedom Time, p. 100.
14. To read Haile Selassie’s powerful 1936 speech at the League of Nations, see Haile Selassie, �
�Appeal to the League of Nations’, June 1936, available at mtholyoke.edu.
15. Ibid.
16. Robbie Shilliam notes that, in December 1935, ‘details of a secret pact were made public wherein Britain and France had proposed to grant Italy significant territories in Ethiopia’. There was a public furore about this, forcing the resignation of Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare. Robbie Shilliam, ‘Ethiopianism, Englishness, British-ness: Struggles over Imperial Belonging’, Citizenship Studies 20: 2 (2016), p. 246.
17. Frank Hardie, The Abyssinian Crisis (London: Batsford, 1974), p. 6. Hooker discusses the tendency even of sympathizers ‘to talk of Africa as a European problem, as a piece of territory coveted by some white nations and controlled by others’. James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (London: Pall Mall, 1967), p. 45. Padmore, representing the IAFE, apparently rebuked a conference called by the National Peace Council thus: ‘you discuss the redivision of Africa to satisfy discontented nations like Germany and Italy, but the views and opinions of the Africans themselves are not solicited. It may have been nothing more than an oversight on your part, but it certainly does not establish much confidence among the people of Africa’. Ibid.
18. Cited in C. L. R. James, ‘Black Intellectuals in Britain’, in Bhikhu Parekh, ed., Colour, Culture and Consciousness: Immigrant Intellectuals in Britain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), p. 159.
19. Ibid., p. 161.
20. Makonnen, Pan-Africanism, pp. 116–17.
21. C. L. R. James, ‘Abyssinia and the Imperialists’, in Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C. L. R. James Reader (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), p. 63.
22. Ibid., p. 64.
23. Ibid., p. 66.
24. Ibid.
25. It is worth noting, however, that there was disagreement about how to deal with the situation. James opposed League of Nations sanctions against Italy, calling instead for ‘workers sanctions’.
26. Robert G. Weisbord, ‘British West Indian Reaction to the Italian–Ethiopian War: An Episode in Pan-Africanism’, Caribbean Studies 10: 1 (April 1970), p. 34.
27. Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), p. 6.
28. Ibid., p. 3.
29. Ibid., p. 98.
30. Cedric J. Robinson, ‘The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis’, Race and Class 27: 2 (1985), p. 60.
31. Cited in S. K. B. Asante, Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1934–1941 (London: Longman, 1977), p. 202.
32. C. L. R. James, ‘Is This Worth a War?’, in At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), pp. 15–16.
33. Ibid., p. 16.
34. A report of a speech given by James at the LCP’s 1933 conference, cited Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain, p. 66.
35. Cited in ibid., p. 87.
36. Ras Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within (Nairobi/London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 114–15.
37. Davarian L. Baldwin, ‘Introduction: New Negroes Forging a New World’, in Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, eds, Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013), pp. 4–5.
38. Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (London: Pluto, 1997), p. 80.
39. International African Opinion 1: 2 (1938), quoted from back cover.
40. Stafford Cripps, ‘Foreword’, in George Padmore, Africa and World Peace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1937), p. ix.
41. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
42. ‘Editorial’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938). For a fuller account of the publishing activities mentioned here, see Carol Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
43. Cited in Asante, Pan-African Protest, p. 205.
44. Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean, foreword by George Padmore (Manchester: Panaf Service/International African Serice Bureau Publications, 1942). Quoted from back cover.
45. Edwards also lists Peter Milliard, William Harrison, Laminah Sankoh, Chris Jones and Babalola Wilkey as key members. See Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, p. 299.
46. Cedric J. Robinson, ‘Black Intellectuals at the British Core: 1920s–1940s’, in Gundara and Duffield, Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain, p. 180.
47. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary, 50th anniversary edn, with an introduction by Robert Lipsyte (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 111.
48. Stephen Howe, ‘C. L. R. James: Visions of History, Visions of Britain’, in Schwarz ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, pp. 168, 165.
49. Schwarz, ‘George Padmore’, pp. 145–6.
50. Cited in Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, p. 205.
51. Cited in Høgsbjerg, James in Imperial Britain, p. 71.
52. For an interesting account of James’s relationship to labour rebellions of the 1930s, see Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘ “A Thorn in the Side of Great Britain”: C. L. R. James and the Caribbean Labour Rebellions of the 1930s’, Small Axe 15: 2 (July 2011).
53. International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
54. ‘Why Such a Bureau?’, IASB Broadsheet, cited in Asante, Pan-African Protest, p. 204.
55. Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, p. 218. The pamphlets that came out formally under the aegis of the IASB include The West Indies Today, Hands off the Protectorates, The Negro in the Caribbean and Kenya: Land of Conflict.
56. James, ‘Black Intellectuals in Britain’, p. 161.
57. Macdonald, ‘ “The Wisers Who Are Far Away” ’, p. 158.
58. Makalani, Matera and Edwards, among others, give enthusiastic praise to International African Opinion, but mention only a few highlights from its short run.
59. ‘Editorial’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
60. ‘Editorial’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., emphasis in original.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., emphases in original.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. George Padmore, ‘Labour Unrest in Jamaica’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
69. ‘The Ethiopian Question’, ibid.
70. ‘The West Indian Royal Commission’, International African Opinion, vol. 1, no. 2, August 1938.
71. Ibid.
72. ‘Politics and the Negro’, International African Opinion 1: 3 (September 1938).
73. Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, p. 214.
74. H. Jeremy Curtis, ‘Correspondence’, International African Opinion 1: 2 (August 1938), p. 13.
75. The Executive Committee of the International African Service Bureau, ‘Rejoinder to a Popular Retort’, International African Opinion 1: 2 (August 1938), p. 14.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Macdonald, ‘ “The Wisers Who Are Far Away” ’, p. 167.
79. George Padmore, ‘Labour Unrest in Jamaica’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
80. O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934–39 (Kingston, Jamaica/London: I. Randle/J. Currey, 1995), p. 144.
81. Ibid., p. 145.
82. Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath (The Hague/Boston: Nijhoff, 1978), p. 296.
83. Bolland, On the March, p. 153.
84. Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica/Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004), p. 82.
85. Butler’s agitational methods, labelled ‘extremist’ and ‘communistic’ (despite his religious leanings), had unprecedented consequences when oilfield workers staged a stay-in strike for higher wages – actions then spreading across the island involving destruction of pro
perty and crowd violence. Black workers were joined by Indian ones demanding recognition of their unions, equal pay with whites, and forty-hour weeks (some suggest a share of the profits was also demanded).
86. C. L. R. James, A History of Negro Revolt (New York: Haskell House, 1969), p. 80.
87. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London/Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]), p. 273.
88. In addition to other works mentioned here, see Robert J. Alexander and Eldon M. Parker, A History of Organized Labor in the English-Speaking West Indies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy in the Labour Movement (Kingston, Jamaica/Oxford: Ian Randle Publishers/James Currey, 2001); and Richard Hart, Caribbean Workers’ Struggles (London: Bogle L’Overture, 2012).
89. Richard Hart, Labour Rebellions of the 1930s in the British Caribbean Region Colonies (London: Socialist History Society, 2002), p. 24.
90. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, p. 20.
91. Ibid., p. 148.
92. Cited in ibid., p. 193.
93. Cited in ibid., p. 372.
94. Bolland, On the March, p. 135.
95. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, p. 206.
96. ‘The African World: Barbados’, International African Opinion, 1: 6 (February–March 1939).
97. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, p. 297.
98. Ibid., p. 300.
99. ‘The Ethiopian Question,’ International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
100. ‘Anti-imperialist Exhibition in Glasgow’, International African Opinion 1: 1, July 1938.
101. ‘The West Indian Royal Commission’, International African Opinion.
102. ‘Editorial: To the Delegates of the Trades Union Congress at Blackpool’, International African Opinion 1: 3 (September 1938).
103. Ibid.
104. ‘An Open Letter to West Indian Intellectuals’, International African Opinion, 1:7 (May–June 1939).
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. ‘Notes on the West Indies’, International African Opinion 1: 1 (July 1938).
110. Ibid.
111. ‘Editorial: Africa and World Peace’, International African Opinion 1: 4 (October 1938).
112. ‘Politics and the Negro’, International African Opinion 1: 4 (October 1938).