In this preview episode, Wendi reads a brief excerpt from Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism, our upcoming #ReadingRevolution series selection.
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Readings & Resources:
Aimé Césaire - Discourse on Colonialism
https://nyupress.org/9781583670255/discourse-on-colonialism/

https://files.libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf
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Left POCket Project Podcast

86. (Preview) Discourse on Colonialism - #ReadingRevolution - Left POCket Project Podcast

In this episode, a #ReadingRevolution installment, we discuss the Introduction and closing interview in the 2001 edition of Aimé Césaire's 1950 anticolonial manifesto Discourse on Colonialism
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Readings & Resources:

Brent Edwards - The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674011038

Négritude
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negritude/

German Colonization of Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_Africa

Matthias Häussler -  Herero Genocide:  War, Emotion, and Extreme Violence in Colonial Namibia
https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/HausslerHerero

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Intro: "My Life as a Video Game" by Michael Salamone
-Outro: "Pooh Pah" by I:Cube
---
Learn more about the Left POCket Project via:
Twitter: twitter.com/LeftPOC
Facebook: facebook.com/leftpoc
Reddit: reddit.com/user/leftpoc/

Subscribe:
Soundcloud: soundcloud [dot] com/leftpoc
Spreaker: spreaker.com/user/leftpoc
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/13trBKujjjBnmWHeDZcC5Z or search "LeftPOC"
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/leftp…d1329313097?mt=2 or search "LeftPOC" in podcasts
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88. Discourse on Colonialism Pt 1 - #ReadingRevolution - Left POCket Project Podcast

REPLAY - Discourse on Colonialism, Pt 1. - Left POCket Project Podcast

Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is Pt. II - Black Workers & Malcolm X

In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus, a point of entry for many into the seriously trying to figure out: what is to be done?

More than this, we encourage you to visit Abdul Alkalimat’s website to explore, read, and hear more of the conference.

Tap in here: https://www.alkalimat.org/brothermalcolm/1990_conf_contents.htm

What we will hear next, in the following order is: Ashaki Binta [Black Workers for Justice], General Baker [Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW)], and Saladin Muhammad [Black Workers for Justice] 

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Pt II - Black workers & el Hajj Malik el Shabazz

Image: Fran Beal 

Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is the final installment, Pt. III – Applying Malcolm 

In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus, a point of entry for many into the seriously trying to figure out: what is to be done?

More than this, we encourage you to visit Abdul Alkalimat’s website to explore, read, and hear more of the conference.

Link to archive: https://www.alkalimat.org/brothermalcolm/1990_conf_contents.htm

We will hear, in the following order, is: Barbara Ransby, Fran Beal, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu & William Sales. 

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Pt III - applying Malcolm X

In an article for Insurgent Notes, Matthew Quest asks, What Type of Historian Was CLR James? CLR James, native of Trinidad, was a historian with a speculative philosophy of history. He brought these methods to his narrative of Haiti in The Black Jacobins (1938), and later in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). James was influenced by historians of the French Revolution, while his approach was shaped by Leon Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the Edwardian radicals GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both literary men who wrote polemical histories sympathetic to the social motion of commoners. 

James’s Notes on Dialectics explored the intersection of Hegel and Lenin as applied to the history of the international labor movement. But his original view of dialectics was just as much informed by how he understood the craft of writing history. For James, dialectic did not mean simply history moved by contradiction. Rather history was a series of ruptures with hierarchy and domination. At his best, he did not read history in a manner that placed the development of the nation-state as the primary unit of study. For James, the working classes, be their wages high or low, and the unemployed possessed a hidden depth, a latent understanding, and a creative genius. Ordinary people, not professional leaders of official society, were the chief actors of history. Humans faced institutionalized oppression, but also partial hindrances they placed in their own path as part of pursuing freedom. History did not move simply by materialist laws, but by romantic elemental drives where the dispossessed pushed from behind those who aspired to lead or rule. 

Highlighting another important contribution of CLR James to Black radicalism, Matthew Quest unpacks his political economic analysis. Quest writes that CLR James is recalled as a Pan-African and independent socialist. A colleague and critic of anti-colonial politicians and activists (Trinidad’s George Padmore, Eric Williams, and Stokely Carmichael, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Guyana’s Walter Rodney) James’s political economy was fundamentally different than his associates. While there are apparent moments of unity, especially around how the empire of capital underdeveloped Africa and the Caribbean through slavery and colonialism, or how federation might help enhance peripheral nation’s sovereignty, James was distinctive. He saw the state, party politics, democracy, and the working class in contrast to Pan-African and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.

Today, we will explore CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. 

This conversation will be presented as a three-part series where we specifically explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. 

To understand the depth and range of impact of CLR James’s work, I would describe him as your ‘rappers’ favorite rapper’. Your favorite theorist, revolutionary, radical, Pan Africanist had to or at some point must come to terms with CLR James’s work. His influences are both undeniable and misunderstood. 

Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 

He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.

thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. I

According to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States. 

“This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and later, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania – and he became involved in “party politics” himself during the time leading up to Trinidadian independence. James strove to reposition Pan-Africanist struggles within a global revolutionary history, by interpreting them in light of Marxist theory and historiography; the latter, in turn, was reshaped through the lens of the experience of (de)colonization. He foregrounded and thematized the relations between class oppression and racial oppression as well as the connections between struggles for emancipation waged by subaltern groups with their own autonomous demands.”

But does this necessarily mean that as a Marxist, James thinks of race in the same way he thinks class? Does a concept of race exist in his writings, one invested with a specific theoretical and/or political function, beyond the attention he pays to actual instances of racial domination?

In Observing Properly Changing Forms of Spontaneity and Organization: Creative Conflicts in C. L. R. James' Hegelian Dialectics and Political Philosophy, Matthew Quest writes that C. L. R. James argued philosophy must become proletarian, not, importantly, that philosophy must be brought to the proletariat (James, Dunayevskaya and Lee, 1986, 128-132). James suggested he had no interest in teaching, and thought it not productive to teach, popular audiences’ pure epistemology [a theory of history … put other way, what makes up the ways we produce knowledge] or the function of categories of cognition. 

For James, one can think correctly without knowing dialectics (James, 1971a, 27). His Notes on Dialectics are instead grounded in political concerns. James asserted that we must be careful not to be stuck in our principles. Politics, or "the organic life of thought forms," must come "out" of contradictions or one's thought is "no good" (1971a, 20, 40). James tried to use his study of dialectics to figure out the relationship between the spontaneity of ordinary people's self-organization and the tasks of a political party or revolutionary organization whose intention was to "propagate” the destruction of bureaucracy" (1971a, 243). Opposed to further inculcating it or expanding it.

we present Pt. II of the three-part series where we are unpacking CLR James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest.

Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 

He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!      

Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. II

Matthew Quest in CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition, examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. 

Quest specifically explores James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveal hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition, disputes that promoted evolution in thought and practice that must be taken up today.

CLR, the elder, was not always able to rigorously explain, save for the most attentive, where he came from politically. James began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant — it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. The next generation did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations.

This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of the Facing Reality group, James’s last small revolutionary organization in 1970 — this was expressed through internal uncertainty about where Mao Zedong and Kwame Ture [Stokely Carmichael] were going. 

Ironically, it was at this moment the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (in Trinidad, Antigua, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica — many who met each other in Canada) and certain dissident currents in Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers began to see the merits of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for Black post-civil rights and post-colonial revolt. These are evidence of other hidden disputes in the radical tradition stimulated by CLR James.

Today, we present Pt. III, the final installment of our three-part series where we unpack C.L.R James’s thought, paying specific attention to his articulation of notions of direct democracy, worker’s self-emancipation/management, and meditations on autonomy with Matthew Quest. 

We intentionally explore CLR James as a frame of reference in the context of current labor struggles, the opportunities, and potential limitations of demands within labor movements [where we think through the limitations of labor demands being divorced from direct critique of imperialism and colonialisms]; and how does CLR James’ conceptualization of autonomy and direct democracy have an important part to play in conceptualization of labor movements today. 

Matthew Quest is an editor of Clash! a collective of writers who advocate for Caribbean unity from below. He has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities in the United States. 

He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!      

Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

thinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. III

Black working-class contributions to the Cuban revolution are immense, yet somehow often neglected in discourses around revolutionary Cuba. 

The long history of African resistance and cultural contributions to Cuban society, which has been intricately connected to global Black freedom movements has been in rhythmic continuity til present day. 

The continuities are clear and important on many levels – that is on the level of internal, as confronting internal contradictions specifically the necessity to fight the colonially structured vestiges of racism in Cuban society is an added terrain of struggle.  As well as external, the constant assault on the Cuban peoples by U.S. and its ally’s imperial logic, captured in the current embargo and attendant sanctions. 

It is here, the dialectical process of liberation finds its most articulate expression, now that the process of decolonialization has been initiated it is the continued anticolonial struggle that takes precedence. The struggle to heighten the internal contradictions, which is a struggle, in its totality, a struggle against the coloniality of being. Where the vestiges of old forms of oppression are presented in new ways. In the case of Cuba, where the colonial structures of race/racism are used to try to undo the revolutionary processes. 
Today, we present a conversation from a few weeks ago with Pedro Sarduy where we engage in a discussion that is in its essence, a mapping of the anticolonial process through an exploration of  Race and Revolution in Cuba: from an Afro Cuban Working Class Perspective. 

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy is a poet, writer, journalist, and broadcaster living in Puerto Rico, London and Havana. He is the author of Surrealidad (Havana 1967), Cumbite and Other Poems (Havana 1987 and New York 1990).

He is also co-editor with Jean Stubbs of Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993) and co-author for the anthology No Longer Invisible/Afro-Latin Americans Today (1995). 

His Journal in Babylon is a series of chronicles on Britain. His first novel, Las Criadas de la Habana (The Maids of Havana), is based on his mother's life stories about pre-and post-revolutionary Havana.  This is the first novel by a contemporary Afro Cuban writer on family life in Cuba. He has written numerous articles, some of which we present on this site.

Together with Jean Stubbs, he wrote Afro-Cuban Voices on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (2000), a book based on interviews with Afro-Cubans (living in the Island), which has been published by the University Press of Florida. 

He also co-edited with historian Jean Stubbs Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (1993).[5] 
Sarduy has read his work internationally and lectured regularly on race, politics, and culture at academic institutions, globally. He was Writer in Residence at Columbia University, New York (1989), on the CUNY Caribbean Exchange Program at Hunter College (1990), a Visiting Scholar at the University of Florida, Gainesville 1993), in 1997 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and on the Rockefeller Fellowship Caribbean 2000 Program. 

He has also been a Charles McGill Fellow & Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (Fall 2004), and Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. 

Awards he has received a number of awards for his poetry. 
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!      

Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

race & revolution in Cuba: an Afro Cuban working class perspective w/ Pedro Pérez Sarduy

This discussion features Mukasa Dada and Obi Egbuna Jr. We focus on contemporary struggles of youth and student movements, globally. With a focus on the ongoing fight for Black liberation and the need for solidarity across different oppressed groups. 

In order to accurately understand the potentialities of the moment, the development and maintenance of a historical consciousness alongside organizing efforts that challenge imperialism, neo-colonialism, and police brutality through direct action and community engagement are presented for discussion.

the role of historical consciousness + global student movements w/ Mukasa Dada & Obi Egbuna Jr

Hip hop, as a cultural product of Africa and African descendant peoples is a rich field of inquiry.  Hip hop as a viable platform that highlights calls for social change is the life-giving breath of hip hop.  

Nevertheless, a viable work that dives deep into the sociopolitical and
philosophical foundations of hip hop as a human expression of African futures is still yet to be written. 

Most work on hip hop is still grasping with it at its surface level.  Still justifying its existence.  Resisting the clutches of the ever-evolving attempts of racial capitalism to control it, hip hop as the historical and ancestral culmination of art, philosophy, politics, collectivism, questions of humanity is simultaneously evolving.  Africa, as Dr. Msia Clark writes in her book, Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers (https://hiphopafrican.com/2017/12/17/hip-hop-in-africa-prophets-of-the-city-and-dustyfoot-philosophers/), is where the origins of hip hop can be found. 

According to Dr. Clark, when Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands, enslaved, they carried with them their human traditions, their cultural traditions that linked them with heaven and earth.  One of these traditions were the rhythmic meditations on life, love, politics, the future—we call music. These traditions were forged in the conditions within which those Africans found themselves, the Americas, South, Central, North—to become jazz, the blues, gospel…and of course hip hop. 

Therefore, to understand the roots of hip hop in Africa—its origins—adds a depth and breadth to studying hip hop that is vital to understand its salience and ability to invent the future. 

What we will hear next is a recent conversation with Dr. Msia Clark on her recently published book…Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers

Dr. Msia Kibona Clark is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. She is originally from Tanzania and received her doctorate in African Studies from Howard University in 2006. Her research has focused on African migration and identity, as well as hip hop and popular culture in Africa. Dr. Clark has published several scholarly publications on African migration, African immigrant identities, relations between African migrants and African Americans, and hip-hop culture’s intersections with social change, gender, and politics in Africa. She has published two books (Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati and Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers) and over ten scholarly articles and book chapters, and currently produces the Hip Hop African blog and monthly podcast hosted at hiphopafrican.com. Dr. Clark is also an accomplished photographer. She has participated in exhibits in Tanzania and the U.S. Her work was also featured in the book project Mfon: Women Photographers in the African Diaspora. 

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Hip Hop In Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers w/ Msia Kibona Clark

Africa World Now Project is a multimedia educational project that produces knowledge about the African world through a series of methods that include: radio, podcast, publishing, film festivals, webinars, social media, etc.

Africa World Now Project is, in essence, a multimedia open-access 'classroom' that provides actionable information which explores continuities and discontinuities in the history, culture, and politics of the entire African world.

AWNP does this by engaging in organic discussions with scholars, artists, journalists, activists, organizers and others who are intentionally disruptive in assessing the various issues that exist in the entire African world.

Hip Hop In Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers w/ Msia Kibona Clark

Africa World Now Project

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