Description
Book SynopsisA cultural history of activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the "long 1960s."
Trade Review“I read
Soul Power with a combination of pleasure and intellectual profit that is rare to come across in academic writing these days. There is so much fresh material here, supported by provocative theses. The result is a welcome challenge to the seasoned reader of postwar American culture and politics.”—Andrew Ross, author of
Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai“In
Soul Power, Cynthia A. Young recovers the important hidden history of internationalism and world-transcending citizenship within the U.S. Black Freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century. This lively, engrossing, and engaging study reveals how commitments to global justice permeated the actions and ideas of Black trade union organizers, armed self-defense groups, community-based nationalists, visionary filmmakers, and radical feminists. Young demonstrates that the ferment and upheaval in Black communities in the mid-twentieth century did not just generate demands for equal rights inside the U.S. nation but raised as well programs aimed at ending imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation around the world.”—George Lipsitz, author of
American Studies in a Moment of Danger“
Soul Power is a significant contribution to the study of US radicalism, highlighting the roles African Americans and other people of color played in these movements. Considering the ambitious range of her project, Young delivers an admirable mix of breadth and depth, covering a number of individuals and organizations and their relevance to the development of the US Third World Left. The carefully chronicled historiography provides a valuable foundation for further investigations of this period.” -- Rychetta N. Watkins * MELUS *
“[T]he great virtue of
Soul Power is to complicate our understandings of 1960s-era social movements.
Soul Power successfully challenges New Left narratives that place the activities of white middleclass youths at their center, and civil rights narratives that concentrate on the struggle against racial oppression while ignoring that against class oppression. By focusing on a series of important, fascinating, and neglected historical actors, Young offers us a much richer understanding of the 1960s-era left.” -- Daniel Geary * Journal of American Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Havana Up in Harlem and Down in Monroe: Armed Revolt and the Making of a Cultural Revolution 18
2. Union Power, Soul Power: Class Struggle by Cultural Means 54
3. Newsreel: Rethinking the Filmmaking Arm of the New Left 100
4. Third World Newsreel Visualizes the Internal Colony 145
5. Angela Y. Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis 184
6. Shot in Watts: Film and State Violence in the 1970s 209
Coda 245
Notes 253
Bibliography and Filmography 271
Index 295
