In this session, historians grapple with the crosscurrents and contradictions of transnational black imaginaries and techniques of solidarity after World War Two. During the postwar era, activists and freedom fighters in the Black Diaspora and throughout the decolonizing world linked their struggles against white supremacy and foreign domination. Black liberationists and Third World organizers forged antiracist and anticolonial solidarities, sharing philosophies of resistance and theories of political kinship. A shifting ideological and racial terrain complicated the practice of transnationalism. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, political actors in Pan Africanist, revolutionary anti-imperialist, and nonviolent struggles labored to define blackness and freedom beyond national borders.

In “Axis of Solidarity: Cuba and the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa,” Brandeis University’s Carina Ray examines the role 400,000 Cubans in Angola played in the liberation of southern Africa from settler colonial rule. Ray draws on oral histories conducted in Cuba, a unique “archive of solidarity” that includes original posters produced by Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), and an array of mementos and ephemera. The firsthand experiences of the Cuban men and women who served in Angola between 1975 and 1991 offer a new analytical lens through which to view the ideological, logistical, and emotional complexity that characterized Cuba’s role in shaping southern Africa’s march towards freedom.

In “The Gravest Error: Expansive Blackness and Stokely Carmichael’s 1970 Guyana Debacle,” Cornell University’s Russell Rickford examines Pan Africanist leader Stokely Carmichael’s highly controversial May 1970 visit to Guyana, South America. Occurring at the height of the African American militant’s influence, the trip was designed to clarify Black Power’s relevance to the Caribbean. But Carmichael’s pronouncements while in Guyana roiled the ethnically and racially complex society. Caribbean radicals promoted an expansive definition of “Black Power” that included exploited laborers of South Asian descent. During his Guyana appearances, however, Carmichael framed Black Power as the exclusive province of Afro-Guyanese, thereby embarrassing his hosts and threatening to aggravate Guyana’s ethno-racial antagonisms. Carmichael’s statements in Guyana reflected broader contradictions between multiracial Third Worldism and black nationalism in the political imaginary of contemporary Pan Africanists.

In “Concerning Nonviolence: Transnational Solidarity and Debates in the Black Revolution,” Benjamin Talton of Howard University explores the global network of individuals and political gatherings around non-violent mass action as the desired strategy to confront white supremacy (in the form of British and French colonialism and the U.S. racist system). Talton highlights communication and collaboration between figures such as Gandhi and Benjamin Mays, King and Luthuli, Nkrumah’s Positive Action Conference, Tom Mboya’s U.S. tour, among others. He also grapples with the counter arguments that Fanon brought to the 1958 All-African People’s Conference and dissenting voices in the U.S. expressed primarily through the Black press.