| This dissertation takes up the relationship between political economy and racial formation to argue that despite the inhospitable climate of Cold War anticommunism, a lively conversation continued about imperialism, the international dimensions of capitalism and white supremacy, and what Frantz Fanon later termed "the pitfalls of national consciousness." Exchanging ideas through a network of publications, direct correspondence, and at milestone events, prominent figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright, but also lesser-known individuals like Esther Cooper Jackson of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the National Maritime Union's Jack O'Dell participated in this anticolonial discourse. Together, they remained close enough to the self-activity of the Black working class and the subaltern opposition of the colonized to enable the production of an arsenal of ideas that a new generation would make use of in the New Left era. Setting out with an analysis of US empire, anticolonialism, and the long popular front constellation of labor and civil rights organizers, cultural workers, and theorists whose influence spanned the 1930s to 1960s and beyond, my argument moves from the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England to the SNYC's Youth Legislature in Columbia, South Carolina, through the pages of Political Affairs, Freedom, and The Crisis, and on to the Asian-African Conference that met in Bandung in 1955, the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956, and the 1957 independence celebrations in Ghana. I conclude by considering the multiple trajectories of influence that postwar anticolonialism followed during the late 1950s and after. |
