Description
Book SynopsisRed Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'.
The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender.
Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.
Trade ReviewProvocative and polemical,
Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures. -- Adom Getachew, author of
Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-DeterminationA fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of
Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome. -- Priyamvada Gopal, author of
Insurgent EmpireThis is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination. -- Firoze Manji, co-editor,
Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar CabralIn this rigorous debut, political theorist Okoth revisits the philosophies of mid-20th-century African revolutionaries....Activists and readers interested in leftist political history will be enthralled. * Publishers Weekly *
Table of Contents1 Decolonisation and the Decline of the 'Bandung Spirit'
2 From Black Studies to Afro-pessimism: The Making of an Anti-politics
3 Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery
4 Négritude and the (Mal)practice of Diaspora
5 Whose Fanon? On Blackness and National Liberation
6 Neo-colonialism, or, The Emptiness of Bearing One's Flag
7 Remnants of Red Africa
