A rich array of recent scholarship has taken on the task of providing global histories of anticolonial thought that reconstruct its networked circulations and adaptations. As the chair of our panel, Manu Goswami, has observed, “anti-imperial internationalists amplified political modernism into a global formation” during the twentieth century, one which sought to develop critiques of imperial political economy as well as programs for anti-imperial solidarity. This panel seeks to assess anticolonialism as a global formation, with a particular emphasis upon the intersection of African and black genealogies of political thought. By focusing on conceptualizations of anticolonialism through the lenses of racial unity, development, Pan-Africanism, and settler colonialism, these four papers critically assess the multiple valences of anticolonial thought.

While recent African intellectual histories have recovered the variety of anticolonial languages of freedom and imaginaries of the state, they have not managed to incorporate the findings of black internationalist scholarship which have concentrated upon unbounded forms of political imagination and mobilization. Yet while this latter group is better equipped to come to terms with the global circulation of black political thought, it has tended to emphasize connection at the expense of describing more contestatory encounters organized under the sign of anticolonialism. By bringing together these bodies of scholarship, this panel re-focuses its inquiry upon both the possibilities and tensions of African and black anticolonial thinking from the 1930s-1960s, the high water mark of anticolonial internationalism.

Merve Fejzula's paper will explore the significance of negritude’s circulation in the anglophone African and diasporic world as a debate over the possibility of racial unity rooted in colonial experience, an approach to re-orienting black internationalism from an Africanist perspective shared by panelist Sarah Marzagora. Her paper on the continual re-positioning of Pan-Africanism among Ethiopian intellectuals during a shift from an anticolonial to a postcolonial context illuminates the constant re-negotiation of anticolonialism as a problematic, which forms a central concern in Sam Klug’s contribution. By focusing upon the notoriously slippery and contested idea of development through the lens of black Americans’ anticipations of neocolonialism, Klug re-frames our understanding of African American ideas about imperial and post-imperial political economy. Finally, Musab Younis’s examination of West African fears of settler colonialism contributes to continental African thinking and resistance to European settler imperialism, which a growing body of work has shown continued to be a threat well into the later twentieth century.

Fears, misunderstandings, and anxieties, as much as strident declarations of shared purpose, pervaded transnational anticolonial politics in the twentieth century. By working through moments of tension, apprehension, and mistranslation in African and diasporic thought and politics, this panel seeks to sharpen our understanding of both the possibilities and the pitfalls of anticolonial internationalism.