Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s encounters with the works of Caribbean intellectuals – C.L.R. James, George Lamming and Frantz Fanon – helped him crystallize global blackness around the nexus between race and geography vis à vis politics of domination and resistance. Emerging from Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean life and thought were his pronouncements on the mismatch between aspiration and deprivation of the postcolonial, post-plantation/post-slavery Caribbean inhabitants. Their experiences, variously and collectively, signalled to Ngugi the importance of language as a cultural currency with which the formerly enslaved and/or colonised people could assert their being in and of the world, and negotiate their place in discursive praxes that had for long defaulted to European languages as the most appropriate vehicles of expression. These processes played out against the backdrop of painful histories, which had raptured the Caribbean islanders’ and some Africans’ attachment to cultures, economics and geographies, due to slavery and colonial violence. Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean history and culture through the creative and critical works of James, Lamming and Fanon rendered the Caribbean a nucleus that Ngugi germinated and nurtured to expound on his earlier thoughts in subsequent collections of essays and memoirs that amplified his concerns with ‘decolonising the mind’ and ‘moving the centre’.

European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.