Anticipating Neocolonialism: African Americans and Postwar Development Politics

This paper argues that development thought and policy represent important sites through which we can understand the transformation of African Americans’ involvement with global politics from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Black Americans’ engagements with the politics of international development were characterized by what I call an anticipatory critique of neocolonialism. On issues ranging from the Point Four Program in the late 1940s to Kwame Nkrumah’s Volta River dam project in the late 1950s, the possibility of colonized territories—especially those in Africa—gaining political sovereignty while remaining in a state of economic dependency loomed large in African American political thought. The anticipatory critique of neocolonialism led in multiple, sometimes conflicting directions in development debates. On one hand, the fear that the U.S. and European powers would continue to exploit the decolonizing world in the aftermath of formal independence was a prime reason to be suspicious of development projects that called for an influx of Western capital. On the other hand, recognition of the economic weakness of newly independent states could also point toward a desire for development aid, on the grounds that it would help build the state capacity necessary for newly independent nation-states to hold power in the international system. While most scholarship on African American internationalism during this period has emphasized the decisive force of Cold War divisions, African American development politics did not always split neatly along Cold War lines. Tracing the efforts by African American thinkers and activists to influence foreign aid policy within the United States and to shape development debates in decolonizing Ghana, this paper further provides a prehistory of the widespread adoption of concepts drawn from development economics in the Black Power movement’s efforts to reshape metropolitan and national political economy.