Manchester University Press - Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic since 1917

Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic brings to light the life histories of a wide range of radical figures whose political activity in relation to the black liberation struggle was profoundly shaped by the global impact and legacy of the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

The volume introduces new perspectives on the intellectual trajectories of well-known figures and critical activists including C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, Walter Rodney and Grace P. Campbell. This biographical approach brings a vivid and distinctive lens to bear on how racialised social and political worlds were negotiated and experienced by these revolutionary figures, and on historic black radical engagements with left political movements, in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Reviews

'This luminous collection brings several revolutionary lives to its pages to show us how these figures both experienced and shaped the world around them. The legendary figures whose stories are told here, many of them central to the black radical tradition, emerged at the intersection of the "Red" and "Black" Atlantics. Their lives and struggles offer us rich visions of possibilities and solidarities beyond the confines of the nation-state which are needed now more than ever. This book is an invaluable resource for such hopes and dreams.'
Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of Cambridge

'A valuable addition to the rich history of African-Atlantic Marxism.'
Steve Cushion, Chartist (No. 320)

'Pathbreaking [...] essential reading not only for labour historians, but also for all those within academia and the public sphere interested in the important, but far too often neglected, linked subject areas of the influences
of revolutionary Marxism, in the form of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, upon black revolutionaries, their social movements, their political and personal biographies, and their relations with predominantly non-black activists and movements in the Atlantic world.'
Neville Kirk, Labour History Review (88.3)

'The essays in this study make a new and original contribution to questions of race, class and gender, Marxism, black nationalism, internationalism, and transnationalism. They should inspire more historians and other scholars to work across disciplines and to transcend the dominant whiteness of labour studies. This will enable us more fully to explore and understand the rich ways in which white and black activists and their movements operated and related in a variety of global spaces and places over time.'
Neville Kirk, Labour History Review (88.3)

Introduction: A galaxy of stars to steer by - David Featherstone, Christian Høgsbjerg and Alan Rice

I - Black Bolshevism
1 Hubert Henry Harrison: Black radicalism and the Colored International - Brian Kwoba
2 Wilfred Domingo under investigation: the 'Negro menace' of 1919 - Peter Hulme
3 Cyril Briggs: guns, bombs, spooks and writing the revolution - Jak Peake
4 Gendering the Black radical tradition: Grace P. Campbell's role in the formation of a radical feminist tradition in African American intellectual culture - Lydia Lindsey

II - Interwar intersections of Red and Black
5 Clements Kadalie, the ICU and the transformation of Communism in Southern Africa, 1917-31 - Henry Dee
6 Pan-Africanism and Marxism in interwar France: the case of Lamine Senghor - David Murphy
7 Black Americans in Russia: Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson - Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon

III - Politics and Poetics
8 Raya Dunayevskaya: the embodiment of the Red/Black Atlantic in theory and practice - Chris Gilligan and Nigel Niles
9 European Marxist or Black intellectual? C.L.R. James and the advancement of Marxism beyond Russian-Leninism - Tennyson S. D. Joseph
10 Poetry and Walter Rodney'sThe Unfinished Revolution- David Austin
11 'Hard Facts': Amiri Baraka and Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s - David Grundy

Afterword - Hakim Adi

Editors

David Featherstone is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Glasgow.

Christian Høgsbjerg is a Senior Lecturer in Critical History and Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton

Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at UCLan, Preston, co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) and director of the Research Centre in Migration, Diaspora and Exile (MIDEX)