Whereas the previous chapter traced the early debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the proper strategies for African American advancement – between Washington’s emphasis on vocational training and gradual assimilation and Du Bois’s call for the “talented tenth” to lead in social and political uplift – the Harlem Renaissance represents a new, more experimental phase of African American thought. Concentrated in Harlem during the 1920s, this movement produced groundbreaking literature, art, and music that explored the meaning of Black identity, freedom, and creativity. Figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Schuyler interrogated existing social norms while celebrating the distinctiveness of Black culture. Locke’s philosophy of cultural pluralism emphasized that African American culture was not a problem to be solved but a source of inherent value, teaching readers how culture can shape identity and influence broader societal understanding. Magazines like Fire!!! and works such as Jean Toomer’s Cane and Nella Larsen’s Passing pushed narrative boundaries, illustrating the ways in which art can challenge assumptions about race, gender, and desire.

Chapter 6 explores revolutionary world-making projects in the Global South during the Cold War, focusing on anti-imperialist movements. It begins with Fidel Castro’s 1966 call to arms against imperialism, highlighting struggles against colonialism and racism. The chapter examines the Soviet Union’s challenge to capitalism and its interaction with anti-colonial projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, arguing these movements were distinct and sought to repurpose legal sovereignty for Third World assertion. It contrasts socialist and liberal internationalisms, particularly in approaches to self-determination and revolutionary violence, noting the Soviet support for anti-colonial forces. The chapter discusses the influence of Marxist-Leninist thought on revolutionary movements, highlighting projects like Pan-Africanism and Cuban interventionism. It examines national self-determination’s role in reshaping global politics and the challenges new states faced in achieving true independence. The chapter concludes by calling for a re-examination of revolutionary internationalism’s impact on international law, recognising the diverse movements that sought to disrupt the Cold War order.

This chapter sets the scene for later analyses, providing a historical overview of African RIOs. I trace the evolution of African RIOs, and discuss how leaders developed RIO policies in response to domestic and transnational threats against their political stability, as well as changing international norms.

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

This chapter focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a Black sea captain who has been largely forgotten but belongs to a lineage of Black Americans active in African repatriation movements from at least the early nineteenth century onward. Dean’s entire life was driven by the spirit of what we may call maritime Pan-Africanism—a variant of Pan-Africanism built upon aspirations of maritime capability. This chapter reveals what Marcus Garvey’s more familiar program, symbolized by the Black Star Line, can tell us about Dean’s significance to both Black Oceanic studies and the study of empire.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

The fourth chapter investigates the years from mid-1961 until King’s assassination in 1968, a period characterized by his intensified and prophetic engagement with Africa. King’s advocacy expanded to encompass robust support for anticolonial movements, initiatives to halt internal African conflicts, lobbying for US development aid, and the creation of scholarship opportunities for African students in American universities. His leadership within the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) is presented as instrumental in amplifying these efforts. The chapter situates King’s embrace of Africa within a broader historical and ideological context, drawing parallels to W. E. B. Du Bois and underscoring the enduring significance of King’s Pan-African vision for contemporary discourse on the Black World and Africa.

Spanning the years 1929 to 1954, Chapter 1 meticulously traces the evolution of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Black transnational consciousness from his formative years through his doctoral studies at Boston University. Emphasizing the profound impact of familial and ecclesiastical influences – most notably his father, Daddy King, Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and the philosophical writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi – this chapter reveals how King’s upbringing in a home and church environment fostered an abiding commitment to racial justice and global affairs, with a particular focus on Africa. The analysis foregrounds the political, economic, legal, cultural, religious, social, and intellectual forces that shaped King’s nascent internationalist and Pan-Africanist inclinations, collectively termed his “Beloved Pan-Africanism.”

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp discuss regional rights projects through which Latin American and African state and non-state actors tried, with limited success, to position their regions competitively in a politically and economically decolonizing world, even as European regional rights projects shored up the political and economic sovereignty of European states, both at home and in overseas territories. While regional projects invested human rights with local meanings, which was key to their acceptance and adoption across regions, they mostly failed to create the world of non-domination that postcolonial states pursued.

This chapter surveys the history of Pan-Africanism as an aesthetic current that paralleled more formalized political solidarity. The chapter asserts that differences across languages and periods complicate Pan-Africanism’s intellectual history. With particular attention to the diversity of origins, it shows how pre-independence African ties with the diaspora fed into continental initiatives along linguistic lines. While the anglophone tradition emerged in close alignment with African American writers, particularly Langston Hughes, the shared roots in negritude between francophone African and Caribbean writers were productive and provocative, lusophone alignments emerged through continent-based anthologies, and arabophone literatures were interpreted through Pan-Arab as well as Pan-African formations. Given the transnational dimension, African languages have figured less prominently in Pan-African literature. In more recent times, feminism, decolonial imperatives, and changes in publishing and educational institutions have been influential. The tensions between Pan-Africanism and other intellectual traditions remain fertile ground for future scholarship.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

When Cheikh Anta Diop suggested, in 1951, that ancient Egypt had been a black civilization, this was the start of a lifelong commitment to researching, arguing, and defending this idea. His work has since opened up and provided contexts for discussions dating back to antiquity, controversially pushing back against long-held, sometimes wrong-headed imperial notions such as that Western philosophy began in Greece. He seeks to recenter and restore meaning to an Africa uniquely severed from precolonial origins.

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.