Reading Pan-African Revolt

“I mean, we’re talking about the last twenty years. That’s most of our lives. Maybe even all of yours!”

Tentative silence. It’s always hard to gauge how this kind of direct appeal will go over. Then again, it’s hard to know what works on a Monday morning in a classroom of college students. In November. This November, no less. Unlike after Trump’s last election, the mood among most of my students doesn’t seem to be shock. It’s world-weariness. Or, for my many out trans students, outright fear or despair. I tried to let my class talk out their feelings the day after it happened, but sometimes people don’t want to talk about what hurts. This week, we’ve moved on to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the George Floyd Rebellion by way of reading Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021), which I consider the best US novel of at least the last decade. Right now, though, I’m just trying to gauge what these years of protest have meant to my students.

“Photo ops.”

“It’s like there will be a flashpoint, and everyone will be talking about it, but then they stop. Until the next one.”

“Some people just protest for the likes.”

“It keeps happening.”

Mind you, my students are distraught, in some cases enraged, maybe even personally scared at the racist violence that saturates the US, most obviously in the police murder of Black people. But evidently they’re also skeptical of the spectacular—in every sense—protests that they’ve been witnessing for most of their lives. After all, they’re young. Teaching at a community college means that I can have students of all ages, but given the push to juice our “full-time enrollment” numbers, which determines our funding, I now have many students who are still in high school. Even if they only take one of our classes, they’re counted as technically enrolled full-time. And because it’s a community college, most of my students aren’t white. The majority of this class—”African American Literature”—is Black.

I worry that I’ve cued up stereotypes about “Gen Z” and social media. Of course if students aren’t out there in the streets, then they’ll be experiencing racial justice protests almost solely through (social) media—and the capital behind it. But such generational complaints strike me as a cop out. Like I said, in many cases, their entire lives have had these protests in the background. And what victories have they seen? Day by day, the fascist international goosesteps onward, and the world literally burns. My students—who are as a group smart and sensitive—know it. How can I blame them for feeling so jaded?

But the more important question isn’t rhetorical. If it’s always occupying me on some level, then it’s been front of mind these last few dismal weeks as I’ve listened to my students’ fears and frustrations and covering silences. Their pessimism about the protests that I and others have put so much into just underscores the question’s urgency:

What am I supposed to do for them?

In my class, I try to give students a sense of how much Black people have fought—literally and literarily—for their liberation, something not unlike what Cedric Robinson called, in Black Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition. In my experience, students are hungry for this story. But recently, I haven’t been thinking about Robinson’s now classic text. Instead, I think about a badly neglected short book by the great Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (1938/1969). Despite a 2012 reissue by PM Press/Kerr Books, James’s History seems seldom read, appearing most often in obscure footnotes and passing mentions. Robinson himself, now often cited, called James’s book “a minor piece, summarizing in historical shorthand some of the occasions of Black rebellion in the diaspora and Africa,” devoting only six descriptive sentences to it in his account of James as a touchstone of the Black Radical Tradition (278-9).

That neglect drew me to James’s book. Once titled A History of Negro Revolt, the book offers a brief account of Black people’s resistance to oppression across the diaspora. The US, Haiti, and the African continent take up almost all of its pages. There’s no pretense at comprehensiveness here. Rather, James offers an introductory accounting that feels at home as a pamphlet stuffed into a rack full of zines at your local infoshop. That feeling, it turns out, makes sense. James first published the book in 1938, the same year as his better-known classic The Black Jacobins (2), through the British Independent Labour Party (14-5). Later, a Black bookstore, press, and activist collective in DC called Drum and Spear Press republished it in 1969 with an added “Epilogue” from James. I like to imagine the little book appearing on old shelves in the ‘70s, then circulating from hand to hand among activists and militants in “Chocolate City,” where James himself had become a fixture (22-3). 

I was also drawn to James’s History by what promised to be its central idea: that one can take Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and capitalism collectively and understand its militant examples as rebellion as such. Labor strikes take up as much of the book’s pages as the more obvious, traditional “revolts.” Some might balk at that choice, as if James were scrounging for examples of the kind of rebellion promised by the title. But I favor it. James recognizes in the Black freedom struggle the two fronts on which it has always been fought: colonialism and capitalism, race and labor, with chattel slavery mediating the two. 

In scholarly writing, this collectivizing approach has fallen out of fashion in favor of specificity and difference, whether geographically or politically. James works at a scale in the book that’s necessarily difficult and sometimes frustrating. After all, there are important differences between, for example, the clandestine, religious Watch Tower movement and Marcus Garvey’s mass U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association) that get elided in his discussion. But shifting to the macro perspective allows readers to understand Black people historically as a global proletariat—rebels of modern history.

At times this requires reading against James. He’s definite, for instance, that chattel slavery in the Americas was a feudal institution. Writing on the long march of emancipation throughout the hemisphere, James argues that “The process worked itself out blindly and irrationally. In territories like San Domingo and later Brazil, where new and rich lands cried out for cultivation, the slave remained profitable for years. But we can see today that once capitalism had begun to throw off feudal shackles, slavery was doomed. The millions of slaves were not only ignorant and backward, with a low productivity of labor. Their potential consumption as free men widened the scope of the market.” (58) I disagree with him here, and works by the likes of Walter Johnson, to say nothing of James’s contemporary Eric Williams, have now made the case why, by the early antebellum period in the US and even earlier by the Haitian Revolution, “slavery was the capital for capitalism,” to quote Immortal Technique. 

History thus contrasts with W.E.B. Du Bois’s magnum opus Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois is more right than James on the (enslaved) Black worker as a modern proletariat. (Du Bois 15-6, James 40) But the two share other points of analysis. Both recognize in enslaved people’s abandonment of bonded labor during the Civil War a general strike. (James 60 and Du Bois Chapter IV “The General Strike”) Both read Lincoln as responding to the political necessities of the moment rather than affirmatively fighting for Black people. (James 59 and Du Bois 81-3) Only James, however, dubs the actions of the Black masses overt rebellion, something that Du Bois pointedly holds back from doing. (James 60, Du Bois 65, and Hahn 58) Most importantly, though, James still considers the Civil War a “bourgeois revolution against feudalism,” limited as he is by his reading of slavery as a feudal remainder, whereas Du Bois more correctly understands the War itself and the Reconstruction that followed it to be a momentarily successful, albeit eventually defeated, proletarian revolution. (James 60-1, Du Bois 708)

Hence one of the reasons I’m so drawn to James in general and his History in particular. One of the most brilliant revolutionary theorists of the last century, he still sometimes gets his analysis wrong. But in reading him, especially over multiple texts, you can witness how his thought moves and transforms (its dialectical character, if you prefer). And you can witness his constant turning toward the people themselves as the agent of their own liberation, even when that turning leads him to a misstep. A History of Pan-African Revolt in its post-1969 editions ends with an “Epilogue” lionizing Julius Nyerere. Robin Kelley’s introduction to the PM Press/Kerr Books edition offers a helpful, critical framing for this disappointing conclusion. In the words of Matthew Quest elsewhere, “James often elevates the political statements of statesmen, from V.I. Lenin to Julius Nyerere, all out of proportion to their real worth given their actual political practice. . . . it is often missed that all of these figures are advocates of various forms of a republic—a regime led by a minority professional ruling elite—not a popular government where working people place forward perspectives of their own and carry them out.” James’s “Epilogue” sits uneasily with the rest of the book, to say the least.  Still, on rereading this section, I sympathize with him. He so clearly is looking for whatever is at hand that will prove usable. It’s a practical move, although he proved overly optimistic in his assessment of Nyerere. 

This is to say that James was not merely a theoretical writer but a practical one. He tried to write his—and our—way out of the crises of capitalism and colonialism. Even when he’s wrong, you can feel that he’s still in the mix, looking for a way forward. It should come as no surprise that the young James, a few years before writing both History and The Black Jacobins in 1938, tried to join the international fight against fascism, not as an internationalist in Spain but in Ethiopia. (13) He’s often criticized as overly cerebral and too enamored with the West’s “high cultural” artifacts. But I’ll take someone like that who nonetheless seeks to join the struggle, risking everything in the process. 

More than anything else, though, it’s the text’s original ending that I love. Before James added his glowing discussion of Nyerere, he ended his History by connecting the Black freedom struggle to, well, the world. Writing of the then scarce victories for African anticolonial movements, James says, “Though dimly, the political consciousness immanent in the historical process emerges in groping and neglected Africa. If Toussaint wrote in the language of ‘89, the grotesquerie of Watch Tower primitively approximates to the dialectic of Marx and Lenin. This it is which lifts out of bleakness and invests with meaning a record of failure almost unrelieved. The African bruises and breaks himself against his bars in the interest of freedoms wider than his own.” (106) 

Of course, James is relating specifically African movements to those of Black people elsewhere, but I take his point to extend further. In recent years, professional theorists and internet trolls alike have taken pains to divorce the fight for Black liberation from other struggles, especially for the Palestinian people. In the wake of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, that move strikes me as abominable. But James provided a corrective to such individualizing approaches nearly a century ago. As he suggests, no liberatory struggle is only about itself. Although solidarity must be deliberately forged and wielded, any true fight for freedom makes all of us that much freer too. That’s why C.L.R. James’s History matters now. 

What am I supposed to do?

I’ve asked myself that question again and again over the last several weeks. Not in the big picture sense—the fact is that we, collectively and individually, already know that answer, no matter how hard we may try to avoid it. Rather, I ask myself that question regarding my students and their seemingly pessimistic views on the fight for Black freedom of the last nearly two decades. What can I possibly say to them? I’ve yet to come up with an answer. 

I guess I ran out the clock. On our last day of class, as bleary-eyed students shyly ate the bagels I brought to celebrate, we talked about the semester. What worked? What didn’t? And what did they learn—if anything? Actually, it sounds like they learned quite a lot, although I’m not sure how much of it fits into the “assessments” and “outcomes” that the institutional bean counters subject professors and students alike to. Whatever they learned, I take credit for none of it. I merely had the good fortune to be the one to show them the Black literary tradition, then talk openly about it with them.

Standing before the class as the semester ended, I struggled to answer their frustration from weeks before by reaching some grand, inspiring conclusion about all these years of protest. Did I succeed? I’ll probably never know. What I can say is this: my students’ tone in that final meeting was one of appreciation at the depth and power of the tradition we read and its depiction of resistance. True, some of their favorite texts were the ones that weren’t overtly “about racism,” in their words. But they also returned again and again to how glad they were to engage with this past and present of Black writing.

I can’t say if my students left still feeling so grim about the struggle in the US. I do think that, more than anything else, they needed the time and space to encounter, read, and think about these ideas, texts, history. No one has allowed these students the time to do that—or to do anything else besides study for the next test and hone themselves for the job market. And day by day, the fascist state closes off the few spaces in which they might still learn this material.

I have no illusions that there’s anything revolutionary about a class that will appear on a college transcript. But I do want everyone—these students most of all—to know about this stuff. It seems they do too. I imagine James, himself a teacher, understood that students’ learning always outlasts their teachers’ lessons. That means we often have to trust that they’ll eventually make good on the ideas we only introduce them to. With any luck, maybe my students’ pessimism about these years will transform into recognition that they’re living the same history and process of Black struggle that we read about together. James the revolutionary further understood that we also have to trust the people will not just recognize but join the fight for their own freedom too.