The Repressive Dimensions of Pan-African Nationalism

In the months following Floyd’s death, energized scholars and activists churned out opinion pieces and essays highlighting and historicizing the heritage and power of black internationalist solidarity. One of the hottest recent academic works on this theme has been Worldmaking After Empire, by Adom Getachew of the University of Chicago. Getachew traces the anti-colonial criticism of select African, Caribbean, and black American anglophone nationalists in the three decades after the end of the Second World War. She argues that their decolonization project ‘sought to create a domination-free and egalitarian international order’ until it became derailed by ‘ideological and institutional transformations’ in the 1970s.

Certainly, pan-Africanism provided a critical fount of solidarity in a world marked by hostility and discrimination. Pan-Africanist political organization in the 1950s and 1960s played a mutually reinforcing role in driving the advocacy that [roughly] synchronously ended both colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean and legal racial discrimination in the American South.