An American Studies Dilemma

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Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 8, Number 1,Spring 1999, pp. 95-115 (Review)

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Diaspora 8:1 1999

An American Studies Dilemma

Tim WatsonMontclair State University

Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism inEarly Twentieth-Century America. Winston James. London and NewYork: Verso, 1998.

Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,1937-1957. Penny M. Von Eschen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1997.

Although these two important books deal with different periodsin twentieth-century history, their motivation and strength comefrom strikingly similar analyses of the same moment in the post-war period, namely the rise of the US civil rights movement. Bothauthors argue that the gains of the 1950s and 1960s were made atthe expense of an earlier American politics rooted in transnationalsolidarities (of both race and class), which was destroyed by theexclusive attention paid to the "American dilemma" of internalracism. James's and Von Eschen's revisionary works demonstratethe necessity for, and the potential of, a new post-Cold War,post-civil rights dialogue between US ethnic studies, especiallyAfrican-American studies, and the more internationally orienteddiscourses of postcolonial studies and diaspora studies—and it is inthe interests of furthering this dialogue that I am reviewing thesebooks here.Penny Von Eschen argues that a vibrant and fruitful interna-

tional collaboration between African-American radicals and anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia was broken up by theTruman administration's rhetoric about US civil rights and by ColdWar anti-Communism, so that "African American liberals began tocraft a dominant civil rights argument of the Cold War era, [whichsaid] that discrimination at home must be fought because itundermined the legitimate U.S. leadership of the 'free world'" (3).After that, black internationalism ceased to be a major force in USpolitical culture, according to Von Eschen's powerful account.Likewise, in an appendix to Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopiathat represents a sustained critique of Harold Cruse's classic Crisis

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of the Negro Intellectual, Winston James claims that the unparal-leled influence of Cruse's work is partly due to his book's "remark-ably strong, anti-foreign, nativist streak" (267). This balefulinfluence in African-American studies, James argues, has caused apowerful historical amnesia about the importance of Caribbeanmigrant intellectuals and activists in the radical political milieu ofthe United States in the interwar period. This unfortunate for-getting is a result of Cruse—and by extension the 1960s civil rightsmovement as a whole—"calling for a black nationalism that ishomegrown, profoundly aware of its peculiar American environ-ment, coming out of the American soil" (267). Von Eschen andJames both claim, therefore, that earlier internationalist anddiaspora-based politics have received short shrift from post-civilrights era historians of the United States because of that era'semphasis on American exceptionalism, a discourse that came to beshared by most black liberals and radicals.James's and Von Eschen's books, in other words, can be usefully

situated at the unstable but potentially productive intersection ofAmerican ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. For the most part,postcolonial studies has drawn the line at including the UnitedStates, and even US minority cultures, within its rubrics—theproblem of the US as simultaneously post-colony, colonizer, andneo-colonial power is one that has been frankly too difficult forpostcolonial studies to resolve, and which it has tended therefore toignore.1 And although US ethnic studies scholars, especially thosein Chicano/a and Native American studies, have worked on manyof the same political and cultural fronts as postcolonial studies—settler cultures versus indigenous cultures, border crossings,memories of underdevelopment, the politics of language, resistanceliteratures, and so on—actual contacts and debate between the twodisciplines have, until recently, been minimal and inconclusive.2Thus Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, in their influential dis-cussion of postcoloniality in Britain, South Asia, and NorthAmerica, tentatively adopt the term "post-Civil Rights" to definethe contemporary United States, in preference to "postcolonial"(292-4), acknowledging the difficulty of applying the terms ofpostcolonial studies to the US context: "We use the term 'post-CivilRights' broadly, to refer to the impact of struggles by AfricanAmerican, American Indian, La Raza and Asian American commu-nities that stretched from the mid 1950s to the 1970s .... 'Post-CivilRights' may be to the USA what 'postcolonial' is to Britain" (293,302).James and Von Eschen, in their different ways, propose a com-

plication of Frankenberg and Mani's formulation. They suggest thatemphasizing the ways in which the post-civil rights United Statesis different from other, postcolonial, locations, as Frankenberg and

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Mani persuasively do, may in fact lead back to an erasure of theinternational connections between the US and the underdevelopedsegments of the global economy. In the pre-civil rights era thatJames and Von Eschen deal with here, those connections are some-times directly colonial—as, for instance, in James's discussion ofArturo Schomburg and Jesús Colon's migration from Puerto Rico toNew York (83-95)—but more often they are articulated at a tangentto territorial colonialism, as when Von Eschen describes the linksbetween African-American groups and South African anticolonialactivists (137-41). I would therefore like to suggest that James andVon Eschen's meticulous histories constitute a double challenge:they force Americanists to confront the US-centric paradigms ofmost American studies and to address the question of imperialism;and, just as importantly, they suggest to the field of postcolonialstudies that it can no longer afford to ignore the history of theUnited States.It should be said that neither James nor Von Eschen place them-

selves within the framework of postcolonial studies, perhapsbecause that field's fragile combination of Foucauldian andGramscian methodologies has alienated more conventional histori-ans, who worry that such "textualism" (or, alternatively, "cultural-ism") simply leads to new versions of bad history. Conversely, post-colonial scholars in the United States have sometimes justified theirinability to fashion alliances with writers and thinkers trained inethnic studies in general, and African-American studies in particu-lar, by labeling the Americanists "untheoretical"—the evidence forwhich often comes down to yet another citation of Barbara Chris-tian's polemical 1980s essay "The Race for Theory."3 This is also thethrust of Sara Suleri's attack on bell hooks's Talking Back, which,Suleri claims, is "predicated on the anecdotes of lived experience....Here the unmediated quality of a local voice serves as a substitutefor any theoretical agenda that can make more than a cursory con-nection between the condition of postcolonialism and the questionof gendered race" (341).4 While postcolonial studies has directedimportant, and sometimes extravagant, attention to the impossibil-ity of the metropolitan intellectual recovering or representing the"local voice," in this formulation Suleri wields the presumed sophis-tication of "theory" like a crude weapon. I would suggest that theagility of the writing and the sheer scope of the archival resourcesin Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia and Race Against Empireconstitute a powerful and, moreover, a theoretical approach to theforging of connections between "the condition ofpostcolonialism andthe question of (gendered) race."Winston James builds these connections by pursuing two lines of

inquiry that are too often foreclosed. Firstly, he approaches the Ca-ribbean as a whole—as a region that is complex and heterogeneous,

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but nevertheless brought together through intra-regional and cross-linguistic relationships. For the most part, cultural critics andhistorians have defined the Caribbean through its colonial andlinguistic divisions: principally, anglophone, francophone, andHispanic. When postcolonial critics use the term "Caribbean," forinstance, they frequently mean what were once known as theBritish West Indies, despite the importance of Frantz Fanon andAimé Césaire to postcolonial theory.5 James, by stressing theimportance of intra-Caribbean migration (from Jamaica to Cubaand Panama, for instance, or from Haiti to the Bahamas), helps usto reconfigure the histories of the Caribbean as a whole. Paradoxi-cally, perhaps, this lets James write more persuasively about intra-Caribbean differences, since they do not function in his argumentto reconsolidate colonial fault lines. Thus, it is in the interests oftracing the complex relationship between black nationalism and "anunhyphenated socialism" (101), rather than in the interests of turfbattles over the relative importance of one version of "the Carib-bean" over another, that James can conclude that, "in broad terms,Puerto Rico could not have produced a Marcus Garvey and Jamaica,by the same token, could not have produced a Jesús Colón (theblack Puerto Rican nationalist and socialist)" (101). He also arguespersuasively that the very different local conditions in Jamaica andBarbados are what account for the relative overrepresentation ofthe former, and striking underrepresentation of the latter, amongthe ranks of migrant radicals in the United States.Secondly, although James concentrates on Caribbean radicals

who migrated to the US, his book does not thereby become justanother tale of immigration that takes the US as the unexaminedunit of analysis, leaving behind the countries and territories thatthe migrants themselves arrived from as unimportant. In fourcrucial chapters that make up the first half of Holding Aloft theBanner of Ethiopia, James outlines the central features of Carib-bean history, discusses the shifting forces that provoked migrationto the US, and analyzes the reactions of Americans, especiallyAfrican Americans, to their interactions with Caribbean peoples inboth the United States and the Caribbean. For example, he tracesthe evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois's ambivalent responses to Ja-maica—from his 1915 visit to the island, which prompted him todeclare that "in Jamaica, for the first time in my life I lived beyondthe color line" and to celebrate the "alluring ... supple ... [and] lithe"Jamaican peasants "treading their silent miles like fate," to his1920 suggestion that although "the visitor to Jamaica sees no colorline in politics or society, ... he easily fails to note that the greatmass of Negro peasantry has no real economic leadership orsympathy but is left to toil at a wretched wage and under disgrace-ful conditions" (qtd. in James 98, 99). Such an approach, while

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recognizing the hemispheric and global power of the United States,does not simply instate the US as the organizing principle ofhistorical analysis. Indeed, James's work fits within ahistoriography of the Americas rather than of the United States: henotes, for instance, in a reversal of our conventional assumptions,that until the nineteenth century, South Carolina was a virtualdependency of Barbados, the settlement being referred to in Londonas "Carolina in ye West Indies" (qtd. in James 9).6Holding Aloft the Banner ofEthiopia, therefore, refuses to treat

the Caribbean as "background" to the real (i.e., "American")narrative of immigration, economic struggle, acceptance ofUS socialhierarchies, "integration," and economic success. Indeed, because ofthe ambivalent positioning of African-Caribbean migrants as both"blacks" and "immigrants," James's book destabilizes this wholenarrative of the US as a nation of (assimilated) immigrants andshows how this version of history is often predicated on theexclusion and subordination of African Americans. Nevertheless,while James manages to avoid this US-centric type of analysis, hesimultaneously shifts attention away from the role of the Caribbeanregion's European colonial powers (after 1898, principally Britainand France) and redirects it to the US as the major colonial andneocolonial power in the region. Thus James's book successfullyavoids foundering on the rocks, on the one hand, of a neocolonialparadigm that assimilates all the narratives ofJosé Martí's nuestraAmerica to the story of these United States, and, on the other hand,of a colonial paradigm that virtually ignores the US in the historyof the French and British "West Indies." By avoiding this secondproblem, James deconstructs the historical obviousness of the colo-nial connection, prolonged by the continued use of such phrases asthe "Mother Country" or of references to Barbados as "little Eng-land": this move, too, constitutes an important challenge to theusual conduits of postcolonial theory.James's earlier work, particularly his long essay "Migration,

Racism and Identity Formation," provides clues to this historio-graphical shift. The earlier essay, which, as its subtitle suggests,tells the history of "the Caribbean experience in Britain," mirrorsHolding Aloft the Banner in paying attention to the lands that theemigrants left and not just to their new, metropolitan destinations.However, in an essay on British-Caribbean relations, James recog-nizes the importance of the US—even though this produces inter-polated passages that seem to work against the grain of the essay.For example, a segment of the essay on the emergence of pan-Caribbean identities in Britain, rather than in the Caribbean itself,ends by asserting the primacy of New York as a Caribbean city:"the most pan-Caribbean person in the world is perhaps a Carib-bean student at the City University of New York" (257). Later on,

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James notes that migration from the anglophone Caribbean to theUS between 1973 and 1982 was over a hundred times larger thanmigration to the UK (263); this, taken together with the "depth andfrequency of contact between New York and the Caribbean" (263),means that

In relative terms the Caribbean population in Britain is rathermarooned. Lower income, higher air fares in comparison totheir counterparts in the U.S. and the absence of a flow fromthe Caribbean all conspire to diminish the cultural enrichmentthat the closer links with the Caribbean afford Caribbean NewYorkers. Of course there are the electronic media which faci-litate an interpénétration of popular cultural forms. But this,in and of itself, does not, contrary to what some commentatorsseem to think, turn London into New York or Brixton intoBrooklyn. (264)

The movement from London to New York as the center of the Carib-bean diaspora is prefigured here—a movement that James himselfmade when he left his position at the University of North Londonto take up a job at Columbia University in the early 1990s. HoldingAloft the Banner ofEthiopia is the logical outcome of these personaland intellectual transitions.Thus, through this non-Anglocentric lens, we can read the history

of Caribbean migration to Britain as an interlude between thepassage by the US Congress in 1952 of the McCarran-Walter Act—which imposed stringent quotas on immigration to the US from theBritish Caribbean—and the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of1965, which substantially eased those restrictions. In the absenceof border controls within the remaining segments of the BritishEmpire after 1948, many thousands ofCaribbean migrants traveledto Britain during this period, built new lives for themselves, andradically transformed the political and cultural landscape of post-imperial Britain. However, while this was a crucial period in thehistory of post-war Britain, it was a far less important moment inthe history of the Caribbean diaspora, as James argues implicitlyin Holding Aloft the Banner: the migration to Britain was only assubstantial as it was because the route to the United States hadbeen closed—a fact missed by most historians and sociologists ofrace in Britain after World War II. The patterns of Caribbeanmigration to New York throughout the twentieth century, includingsignificant migration prior to World War II, bear out James's claimfor the centrality of New York in the Caribbean diaspora.7 In hisbook, James tells the story of some of the most significant politicaland intellectual figures out of the 150,000 people of African descentwho entered the US between 1899 and 1937, the vast majority ofwhom were from the Caribbean (James, Holding 7).


By de-emphasizing the importance of Britain in the anglophoneCaribbean, James offers an implicit answer to some traditionalAfrican-American claims that English-speaking Caribbean peoplesin the US hold themselves superior because of their "British" roots.This was the attitude of New York City's oldest black newspaper,for instance, the New York Age, during the anti-Garveyite campaignon the mid-1920s: the members of Marcus Garvey's United NegroImprovement Association (UNIA), who were disproportionately ofCaribbean origin, were described as "undesirable aliens whosepresence in this country is a dangerous intrusion.... [They should]be deported to the islands whence they came, ... so that they mayreturn under the British flag that they honor so greatly" (qtd. inJames, Holding 4). While James is at pains to point out the dif-ferences, as well as the links, between African Americans andAfrican Caribbeans, and while he notes the "shameful, politicallyretrograde fact that Caribbean migrants often behaved in an arro-gant and disdainful manner toward Afro-Americans" (290), he is notprepared, as Harold Cruse was in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,to dismiss Caribbean Americans as conservative, arrogant "Afro-Britishers."Instead, his book seeks to recover the histories of the many

Caribbean intellectuals who played prominent roles in radicalsocialist and black nationalist movements before World War II inthe United States: among the better-known figures he discusses areMarcus Garvey, Jesús Colón, C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, ClaudeMcKay, George Padmore, Eric Walrond, Arturo Schomburg, andAmy Jacques Garvey. His book begins with the African-Americanpoet and political activist Fenton Johnson's observation in 1919that "we of America owe much to the West Indian.... In every fieldof American life we find the West Indian pushing ahead and doingall in his power to uphold the dignity of the Negro race. In everyindustry, in every profession, in every trade, we find this son of theislands holding aloft the banner of Ethiopia" (1). James's goal is torevisit and, where appropriate, to celebrate this Caribbean involve-ment in US radical politics, without thereby reinstating Caribbean-American "hubris" (3) about their contribution to these struggles,particularly vis-à-vis African Americans.This is a fine line to traverse, and for the most part James

succeeds in his quest. Part of that success lies in his commitmentto recovering the stories of Caribbean radicals whose deeds andwriting have largely been forgotten. For instance, James begins hishistory by taking the career of Samuel Haynes of Belize (thenBritish Honduras) as emblematic of radical Caribbean migrancy inthe early twentieth century. Far from honoring the British flag,Haynes, alongwith many other men from the anglophone Caribbean,was radicalized by his experience serving in the British Army duringWorld War I. Racism and segregation were the rule for nonwhite

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West Indians in the British Army. Despite volunteering to fight forthe Empire, they were rarely sent into actual combat, and certainlynot against white Europeans; and in the camps, where they wereput to work cooking, cleaning, and fetching for the white "Tom-mies," the Caribbean troops endured much overt and covert discri-mination (56-62). James shows, through careful piecing together ofarchival material, how eventually members of the British WestIndies Regiment mutinied against their officers in Italy in Novem-ber 1918 and, when the revolt was suppressed, formed a "CaribbeanLeague" to press for better conditions within the armed forces (63).Quickly, however, the group moved on to call for freedom and self-rule for the Caribbean islands and began talking of organizinggeneral strikes when they returned home. As James argues, "a pan-Caribbean identity had emerged out of the crucible of war" (64).Although the Caribbean League was short-lived, its ideas bore

almost immediate fruit after the end of the war. Strikes and otherforms of unrest occurred in much of the British Caribbean in 1919,especially in Trinidad and British Honduras, and were often led byex-servicemen who were affiliated with Garvey's UNIA. Back inBritish Honduras, Samuel Haynes became the general secretary ofthe branch of the Garveyite movement there, before being recruitedto join the leadership in the United States. He rose to be one of thefour-member Committee of Presidents of the UNIA, and the lyricsof the Belize national anthem are taken from one of his poems,"Land of the Gods." But, as James argues, Haynes rarely merits afootnote in histories of African America, and his name is almostunknown even in his native Belize (69). James's book is both anexample of historical recuperation and an explanation of the rea-sons for the omissions it corrects. James argues that "the Carib-bean, being the area that has historically produced the most peri-patetic of all African peoples, has also thrown up an extravagantlydisproportionate number of pan-Africanist political activists andintellectuals" (71), ofwhom Samuel Haynes was one, albeit a minorfigure.8 This personal, political, and intellectual restlessness,however, has meant that Caribbeans have tended to slip out ofhistorical narratives dominated by national frameworks—and even,sometimes, out of more recent transnational narratives.This omission is why James devotes so much space to the ac-

tivities of the short-lived Harlem-based organization called theAfrican Blood Brotherhood, which was dominated by Caribbeanimmigrant intellectuals. Until now, the ABB has been viewed eitheras a front for the US Communist Party—and thus swallowed up bythe historically more powerful international(ist) discourse oftwentieth-century socialist movements—or as an insignificant, andenvious, group of black intellectuals opposed to Garveyism. MarkNaison, for example, in his powerful and influential history

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Communists in Harlem During the Depression, is skeptical that theABB "functioned as an organization in most of the places it claimedmembers.... Perhaps future scholarship will reveal the organizationhad a substantial political base; for the moment, I have my doubts"(27). Winston James does not entirely clear up those doubts here.He cites the recollections of the movement's founder and primemover, Cyril Briggs: "The Brotherhood never attained the propor-tion of a real mass organization" (qtd. 156); nevertheless, Jamesargues persuasively that the ABB was of "extraordinary importanceas an expression of black radicalism in the 1920s," and not justbecause of its "pioneering role in the development of black Bol-shevism and Marxism in the early twentieth century" (156). Jamessees the ABB as important because of its "unstable [ideological]equilibrium" between black nationalism and internationalist so-cialism: "at no point did it touch, let alone merge during itsindependent existence with, the politics represented at either endof the continuum" (157).The ABB, therefore, occupies a crucial place in James's intellec-

tual and political history, since it represented a radical blackmovement that, at least in the beginning, didn't fall into the trapsofeither an exclusivist ethnic nationalism or a class-based socialismunable to accommodate the politics of race and ethnicity. There isa danger here, however: by promoting an organization because itdid not fail for either of these two reasons, James runs the risk ofdownplaying the fact that the ABB nevertheless did fail to achieveits stated goals of building a mass movement committed to "a lib-erated race; absolute racial equality; ... organized and uncompro-mising opposition to the Ku Klux Klan; ... higher wages for Negrolabor, shorter hours and better living conditions; ... co-operationwith other darker races and with the class-conscious white workers"(James 171). It may well be true that the ABB was more than apaper organization, and James suggests that the archive is remark-ably silent on the membership of the ABB because it was primarilya "secret organization" (169). It may also be true that the ABB wasnot simply a front organization for the Workers Party from itsinception; James quotes Briggs as saying that "the CommunistParty had no part in initiating the organization of the Brotherhood"(qtd. 162). Nevertheless, the ABB leadership—and there is littleevidence here that the ABB consisted of anything other than itsleadership—joined the CPUSA en masse within two years of theBrotherhood's founding in late 1919; its history, therefore, becomesharder to distinguish from the general failure of the revolutionaryleft to build a more substantial base in the US before the PopularFront days of the 1930s.9It is undoubtedly true that the ABB leadership represented a

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Caribbean radical intellectuals: they included Cyril Briggs (whosecombative testimony to the House Un-American Activities Commit-tee in 1958 James reproduces here); the two black charter membersof the Workers Party, Otto Huiswoud and Arthur Hendricks; andClaude McKay, WA. Domingo, Richard B. Moore, and GraceCampbell, among others.10 (The only woman on the ABB's SupremeCouncil, Campbell has been unfairly overlooked in histories of theblack left, James convincingly argues. The Council held its meetingsat her house in Harlem; she was the organizational force of theBrotherhood; she was one of the pioneering black women in theSocialist and the Communist Parties in the 1920s and 1930s and"one of the first women, black or white, to run for public office inthe State of New York" [174] when she campaigned on the Socialistticket for the State Assembly in 1919 and again in 1920, receiving7% and 10.5% of the vote [175].) However, by focusing on politicalintellectuals who were by and large not linked to large-scale popu-lar movements, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia sometimesappears to single out figures whose political positions could remain"pure" precisely to the extent that they did not have to adapt themto the contingencies and contradictions of a mass organization.This problem will be familiar to readers of those hagiographie

accounts of the best known Caribbean radical of the century, C.L.R.James, which sometimes revel in the fact that his most politicallyand intellectually astute writing was done in the context of theever-diminishing circles of the minuscule non-Stalinist Marxist leftin the US in the 1940s and 1950s—the potential problems raised bypolitical sectarianism and vanguardism are happily avoided in favorof the free-floating oeuvre itself.11 In other words, when WinstonJames tells of the remarkable Hubert Harrison, for instance, andpersuades us of his importance as "a major inspiration" (126) bothfor the black socialism of A. Philip Randolph's Messenger magazineand for Marcus Garvey's "race first" black nationalism, at a certainpoint the reader wants to know why Harrison was important to the"black intelligentsia of Harlem ... [but] less successful with themasses" (128). The answer James gives seems insufficient: "Harri-son was light years ahead of his time, which largely explains hispreeminence as an intellectual, and accounts for a substantial partof his relative failure as a politician" (130). Sometimes, despite hiscareful materialist analysis of the Caribbean and US conditionsthat created these remarkable migrant activists, James appears tovalorize the "advanced" intellectual over the (presumably mis-guided) "masses."12To say this is not to plead for a better, or more accurate, account

of the "masses" themselves told from their own point of view; oneof the primary achievements of postcolonial studies is to havedrawn attention to the problematic nature of most calls to hear the

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voice of the subaltern classes. One wishes, in fact, that James haddevoted more space to the elements of an explanation for the poli-tical failure of movements like the ABB that are already present inhis book: the constant and sophisticated surveillance by the FBIand British intelligence (both of whose files James mines cleverlyto help reconstruct the internal workings of groups like the ABB,turning the reports of police informers and spies to his advantage);the climate of racial terror that existed across much of the USimmediately after World War I (especially the "Red Summer" of1919, when lynchings and anti-black riots took place in unprece-dented numbers and with unprecedented ferocity); and the classand cultural differences between African Caribbeans and AfricanAmericans that sometimes worked counter to the need for solidarityof the racial uplift variety.13 These aspects of early twentieth-century US politics and society could be combined to provide anaccount of the sometimes tenuous relationship between many blackpolitical leaders and those they claimed to represent.Sometimes, therefore, it seems that Holding Aloft the Banner,

while it pays exemplary attention to recovering the stories of someof those migrant activists who have fallen through the cracks ofconventional historiography, has surprisingly little to say about theone genuinely mass movement in the prewar US in which Carib-beans played a significant role: Marcus Garvey's Universal NegroImprovement Association. James certainly acknowledges that theUNIA "was the largest and most powerful black nationalist or-ganization the world has ever known" and that it was, "for much ofthe African diaspora and for masses of people in Africa, a giganticbeacon of hope promising to bring to an end the long night of theiroppression" (136). Moreover, he has uncovered important informa-tion about the importance of women in the Garveyite movement,focusing on the life and achievements of Amy Jacques Garvey, aJamaican, who was the most powerful woman within the UNIA,running a groundbreaking Woman's Page in the movement news-paper, the Negro World, that espoused strong feminist views at atime when women's roles in the UNIA were often extremely cir-cumscribed (146-55). However, James devotes relatively little ofhisbook to the Garvey movement, at least in proportion to themovement's size—this is no doubt partly because its history "is wellknown and documented" already (137). However, rather than at-tempt to explain the mass appeal of the UNIA, to analyze themembership and its attraction to the Garveyite philosophy, James,in a significant moment, turns instead to the defections of theeducated members of the diaspora from the UNIA after a series ofscandals, including Garvey's meeting with the Klan, his indictmenton embezzlement charges in 1922, factional infighting, and so on:"All these diminished the intellectual layer within the UNIA; and

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it was not substantial to begin with" (148). This, it would seem, isreason enough to explain the historian's more sympathetic portrayalof the African Blood Brotherhood, which campaigned vigorouslyagainst Garveyism after 1921. 14To my mind, the most powerful section of James's book is his

analysis of the Afro-Cuban community in Tampa, Florida, in theearly years of this century. In his final chapter, James reconstructsthe story of the Cuban cigar-makers (tabaqueros) of Tampa andYbor City; here a well-organized working-class community, bothblack and white, was ultimately broken down both by US laborpolitics and by the segregationist racial politics of the US South.Importantly, James does not center this chapter around an in-tellectual and political figure, although he does note the remarkableantiracism of José Martí, who announced the founding of the Par-tido Revolucionario Cubano while visiting Tampa in 1891. Instead,James presents a complex portrait of a Cuban community that, inthe late nineteenth century, cohered as a group across racial lines,despite Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson (the 1896 Supreme Courtcase that established the legal principle of "separate but equal" thatlegitimated segregation)—although the author makes it clear thatYbor City, a tobacco company town on the outskirts of Tampa, wasnever quite a multiracial utopia. Among these tabaqueros anarch-ism, syndicalism, and communism, as well as anticolonial Cubannationalism, were all well established in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century.The strength of this segment of James's analysis—the element

that makes it most useful for transnational understandings ofpolitical and cultural movements—lies in his careful unraveling ofthe multiple analytic threads necessary to understand the develop-ment of racial and class identities in Tampa. Local, national, andinternational questions all have to be answered in order to under-stand this immigrant community and its shifting identities andpolitics. The fraught relationship between Cubans, including Afro-Cubans, and the African-American community; the impact of the1898 Spanish-American war; the relations between Cuban and Ita-lian cigar workers; the juridical and cultural impact of the Plessycase; the power of US capital to suppress labor activism: all these,and more, James pulls together here.15He is thus able to perform a delicate balancing act: demonstrat-

ing how racial and ethnic identities are the product of complicated,but contingent, historical forces (some "Cubans" became "black" overthe course of time; others became "white"), while at the same timedemonstrating the real effects generated by the ideology of race(some Cubans were excluded from Cuban social and political groups;many of these same, black, Cubans, then in turn excluded blackAmericans from their communities). This point—the arbitrariness of

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"race" coupled with its real effects—is by now familiar to many inthe fields of critical race theory and cultural studies. As Stuart Hallputs it,

identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outsidehistory and culture ... It is not once-and-for-all. It is not afixed origin to which we can make some final and absoluteReturn. Of course, it is not a mere phantasm either.... It hasits histories—and histories have their real, material andsymbolic, effects.... Cultural identities are the points ofidentification, the unstable points of identification or suture,which are made, within the discourses of history and culture.(113)

James himself carries out an unstable suture between (African)American studies and Caribbean studies, which now other scholarswill build on and solidify. He shows, for instance, that it is partlythrough the (post-civil rights) lens ofAfrican-American studies thatthe historian can even identify an "Afro-Cuban community" in southFlorida—the very grounds of James's analysis might be said to beidentified as such only retroactively. On the other hand, hemanages to demonstrate that even if racial, ethnic, and linguisticidentities are not fixed, the multiple histories of Caribbeanmigrants do allow us to join them together under certain conditions,however unstable. This, ultimately, is the strength of this meticu-lously researched and passionately argued work of history. ReadingJames's book provides a powerful inoculation against what he de-scribes as the "generally gutless and bloodless intellectual times inwhich we now live" (262).

Penny Von Eschen's Race Against Empire takes up James's his-tory at almost exactly the point that Holding Aloft the Bannerleaves off, the mid- 1930s, and, in particular, emphasizes the impor-tance of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as an internationalrallying point for diaspora intellectuals of all political stripes.(Incidentally, much ofthe post-war political and intellectual dissatis-faction with Marcus Garvey stems from his decision not to supportHaile Selassie, and thus to side with Mussolini's invasion—Jamesmakes this point in his epilogue [259].) In London, C.L.R. James,George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson builtthe International African Service Bureau in response to the crisisin Ethiopia; in the US, black nationalists and leftists formed ashaky alliance in solidarity with Ethiopia. Von Eschen takes thismoment as a sign of the beginning of a relatively small window oftime (less than twenty years) in which African Americans in parti-cular developed a strong internationalist perspective, an interna-

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tionalism that was shattered by the success of the civil rightsmovement and the predominance of the struggle for the benefits ofUS citizenship.As Von Eschen tells it, this is a crucial, and often forgotten,

interlude in the history of US race relations—and in the history ofthe black diaspora as a whole, although Race Against Empire isprimarily concerned with the United States. Even Walter White,executive director of the NAACP and later a wholehearted anti-communist, could declare in 1945 that World War II "has given tothe Negro a sense of kinship with other colored—and also op-pressed—peoples of the world.... The struggle of the Negro in theUnited States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialismand exploitation in India, China, Burma, Africa, the Philippines,Malaya, the West Indies, and South America" (qtd. in Von Eschen8-9). In part, of course, this statement mirrors the anti-imperialistrhetoric that the US deployed in its successful effort to claim itsplace as the hegemonic neocolonial power after the war, displacingthe erstwhile imperial powers, especially Britain and France. ButVon Eschen shows that the fact that White spoke this language isevidence of the extent to which international solidarity movements,especially those that linked Africa and African America, helped todefine the terms of black politics in the US in the 1940s and early1950s. Anti-imperialism allowed for a coalition of left and liberalAfrican Americans; as Von Eschen argues,

the language of antiimperialism could be so widely sharedbecause the concept could mean different things to differentpeople. A [Walter] White or a [George] Schuyler shared adescription of exploitation with a [George] Padmore or a[n][Alphaeus] Hunton but differed in their prescriptions forcorrecting this exploitation.... Yet it would be wrong to see thepolitics of the African diaspora as only a superficial conver-gence of liberals and leftists. At the heart of the anticolonial-iste' core set of beliefs was a conception of democracy thatembraced the struggles of colonial peoples and saw blackpeoples as part of the laboring classes of the world. (42)

The anti-imperialist coalitions of the post-war period were able tohold in check the apparent contradiction between race-based andclass-based political discourses—a process no doubt made easier bythe prewar politics of the Popular Front (about which Von Eschenhas curiously little to say).16 Thus political alliances could be builtwithout stumbling over the slippage between race and class in suchstatements as Walter White's recognition ofAfrican-American "kin-ship with other colored—and also oppressed—peoples of the world."

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This meant that there emerged the possibility of seeing race, andracial identities, as the product of specific historical forces, ratherthan as essences. Some African-American writers and thinkers thusmade explicit the understanding of race that is implicit in WinstonJames's historiography: "The analysis of racism as something rootedin the history of specific economic, political, and social practicesencouraged discussion in the popular press of the constructednature of race. In 1942 the [Pittsburgh] Courier carried the head-line '"Race Is an Invention" Says George Schuyler'" (Von Eschen41). This préfiguration of Stuart Hall's position on cultural andracial identities lay behind the most remarkable mass mobilizationof African Americans for "foreign" causes. Von Eschen describeshow the Council on African Affairs (led by Paul Robeson, W.E.B DuBois, Alphaeus Hunton, and Max Yergan) organized a rally in 1946attended by more than 19,000 people at Madison Square Garden aspart of a campaign for famine relief, and in solidarity with strikinggold miners, in the Ciskei region of South Africa (65-7, 103-4).Earlier, the CAA had co-sponsored a Rally for the Cause of FreeIndia at the Manhattan Center on 34th Street, at which Robesonalso spoke and which attracted more than 4,000 people. This kindof mobilization was perceived as a profound threat by a US statethat, even before the end ofWorld War II, was positioning itself asthe "post-imperial" imperialist power. As Nikhil Pal Singh arguesin his important recent essay "Culture/Wars," which serves as asignificant counterpoint and complement to Von Eschen's book, "theemerging national security state registered with alarm and concernthe powerful conjoining of struggles for domestic citizenship andvisions of worldly emancipation in the writings of so many blackintellectuals from this period" (485).Thus Von Eschen's book becomes primarily an investigation into

the defeat of this short-lived confluence of different streams of blackradical thought in the US. She claims that the liberal leadership ofthe emerging civil rights movement embraced the Truman Doctrineof anti-Communism and the international projection of US powerin defense of "freedom and democracy"; the suddenness and com-pleteness of this about-turn meant that "the broad anticolonialalliances of the 1940s were among the earliest casualties of theCold War" (107). Von Eschen argues that, while some African-American liberals embraced the Truman Doctrine from longstand-ing anti-Communist positions, others, includingWalterWhite, wereultimately forced to align themselves with the Truman administra-tion for more strategic reasons: he and other leaders of the NAACPsuppressed their earlier internationalism because they "grasp [ed]the fact that criticism of United States foreign policy was becomingfundamentally unacceptable to the Truman administration at the

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same time that new opportunities were emerging to influence thegovernment on domestic civil rights" (109; original emphasis).Whatever the cause of this historic shift, it signaled the end of amore complicated understanding of race and empire, to be replacedby such statements as Randolph's belief that segregation was "thegreatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands ofRussia and international communism today" (qtd. in Singh 490).Von Eschen shows that while in the 1940s racism was widely per-ceived as "located in the history of slavery, colonialism, andimperialism," by the 1950s, "the equation was reversed: rather thanthe result of slavery and colonialism, 'race' and 'color' were nowoffered as explanations for them" (155). The "American dilemma,"in Gunnar Myrdal's famous phrase, became a template by which tounderstand the whole world. Black civil rights discourse cham-pioned pluralism, anti-discrimination legislation, and the like at theexpense of the wider vision of those, like Robeson, who refused toproject American notions of "prejudice" and "democracy" onto themap of the world—the Cold War equivalent of the British andFrench "mission civilisatrice."Strikingly missing from Von Eschen's account of this historic

shift are the heirs to the Caribbean radicals James so painstakinglyunearthed in Holding Aloft the Banner. Partly, this is a methodo-logical question—Von Eschen has chosen to focus on African Ame-ricans, after all, as her subtitle suggests—but just as James's bookis strengthened by its pan-Caribbean focus, and by its occasionalemphasis on African-American figures (like Grace Campbell of theAfrican Blood Brotherhood), Von Eschen's book gains depth from itsearly engagement with George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and theblack diaspora in Britain just before and during World War II.James, however, all but disappears from Race Against Empire afterhe moves to the US in 1938. One wishes for more emphasis onblack migrants within the US and their role in expanding the para-meters of black radical politics during this period. For instance, VonEschen shows how the international coverage of the black popularpress, especially the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender,shrank to almost nothing after those newspapers signed on to theTruman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947; thereafter, shesuggests, the black press has been for the most part uninterestedin transnational questions. A quick glance at the Amsterdam Newsor the City Sun in New York would confirm that view; however, theBrooklyn-based Caribbean Life carries extensive weekly coverage ofAfrican politics and society, as well as pan-Caribbean and African-American news.17 Von Eschen's careful reading of black popularnewspapers of the 1940s and 1950s could usefully have beensupplemented by an analysis of the Caribbean-American press.

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Such criticisms, however, are in fact a sign of the extent to whichJames and Von Eschen, separately and together, help to effect adisciplinary and historiographie seismic shift, such that African-American studies, for example, can be asked to be more attentiveto diasporic and transnational questions. I began this review essayby attempting to situate these works within, but also perhapsagainst, the field of postcolonial studies. It seems to me that Jamesand Von Eschen join those others who are now working fruitfullyat the intersection of postcolonial and ethnic studies withoutcollapsing the two fields into each other. In particular, there is anemerging group of younger scholars for whom this intersection isvitally important: Vilashini Cooppan, Brent Edwards, DavidKazanjian, Colleen Lye, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, NikhilSingh, and Alys Weinbaum, among others. In their influential essay"Crosscurrents, Crosstalk," which I discussed briefly at thebeginning of this essay, Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani claimthat the civil rights movement is to American Studies what theanticolonial movements of the 1940s and 1950s are to postcolonialstudies; this is an important analogy to bear in mind when talkingabout US postcoloniality. Minority groups in the US, despite theclaims to Third World status so important to the militant BlackPower, La Raza, and American Indian Movement activists of the1960s, have not been equivalent to the colonized elsewhere in theworld.18 However, James and Von Eschen suggest a further refine-ment of Frankenberg and Mani's formulation, since they both arguethat the civil rights movement represented the end of an importantstrain of anticolonial writing and activism inside the US; that therehad been an attention to questions of global power, capitalist ex-ploitation, the production of racially and economically disempow-ered subjects, and the history of slavery and empire well beforethese became the central questions of postcolonial studies.Such a rethinking of US postcoloniality helps us to fill out the

most useful definition provided to date, that of Jenny Sharpe in heressay "Is the United States Postcolonial?" Arguing against the con-flation of postcoloniality with migration to the West, Sharpeproposes that "the 'postcolonial' be theorized as the point at whichinternal social relations intersect with global capitalism and theinternational division of labor. In other words, I want us to definethe 'after' to colonialism as the neocolonial relations the UnitedStates entered into with decolonized nations" (184). While suchdefinitions can always generate counterexamples (for example, arethe relations between the US and Puerto Rico that helped bringArturo Schomburg and Jesús Colón to New York City best charac-terized as "neocolonial"?), I think Sharpe's is useful and productive.James's and Von Eschen's books work well within this framework:

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James shows the dialectic between global capitalism, inducingmigration to the US, and the way US social relations are altered bythe Caribbean migrants; Von Eschen highlights a moment when theconnection between the international division of labor and the op-pression of racial minorities in the US was made most emphaticallyand persuasively.By relaying the prehistory of the US civil rights movement from

the point of view of transnational networks, both these works forcereaders to reconceptualize the civil rights movement as part of thehistory of global capitalism and the international division of labor,rather than as part of the glorious unfolding of the manifest destinyof "America," which can then serve as a model for understanding,or misunderstanding, the rest of the world. As Nikhil Singh writes,"A negotiated solution to the problem of 'the Negro's' civil rightswas integral to engineering the cold war liberal consensus withinthe United States" (491); American Studies is only now coming toterms with the extent to which its focus on civil rights-inspiredquestions within the US has been complicit with US imperialismoverseas. James and Von Eschen, by challenging this US-centricview of the world, demonstrate the extent to which we are stilllargely conducting intellectual operations from within that sameCold War liberal consensus, which the end of the Cold War hasdone little to break down. In their collaboratively written introduc-tion to the forthcoming volume Post-Nationalist American Studies,Barbara Brinson Curiel et al. precisely articulate the dilemma of,and possible new directions for, American Studies: "We join the cur-rent chorus of calls to move U.S. -based American Studies, Women'sStudies, and Ethnic Studies away from uncritical nationalist per-spectives and toward what has been variously called critical inter-nationalism, transnationalism, or globality. In particular, we areconcerned with how one negotiates among local, national, andglobal perspectives, while remaining vigilantly self-critical aboutthe epistemologically and historically deep ties American Studieshas had to U.S. imperialism." It is exactly this negotiation, and thisvigilance, that marks out the work of James and Von Eschen assignificant and groundbreaking.

Notes

1. There have been one or two exceptions, most notoriously in the influential text The EmpireWrites Back. There, the authors use the term "post-colonial" in the most sweeping terms, "tocover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to thepresent day" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2). This leads them to conclude that "the literatureof the USA should also be placed in this category lthe postcolonial]. Perhaps because of itscurrent position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature hasnot been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved overthe last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere" (2). Most

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subsequent postcolonial critics have summarily rejected Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's claim forthe paradigmatic status of the US in postcolonial criticism, although American literary historianLawrence Buell has argued for the "postcolonial" nature of early US literature in his essay"American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon."

2.American studies (more broadly conceived than as "ethnic studies") signaled its turn towardquestions of imperialism with the 1993 anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, editedby Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. The topic of the 1998 American Studies Associationconvention in Seattle was "American Studies and the Question of Empire." To my mind, the mostimportant theoretical account of the relationship between postcolonial studies and US ethnicstudies is the one provided by Jenny Sharpe in Diaspora in 1995. I return to Sharpe's essay, "Isthe United States Postcolonial?," and to other new directions in American studies, at the end ofthis essay.

3.Christian's essay is included, somewhat anomalously, in Padmini Mongia's recent anthologyof postcolonial theory, where it functions as almost the lone antitheoretical counterpoint toBhabha, Spivak, Chakrabarty, and others.

4.See Visweswaran for a powerful critique of Suleri's position for failing to address seriously theimplications of the part of hooks's argument that Suleri finds most objectionable: "We often forgetthat many Third World nationals bring to this country the same kind of contempt and disrespectfor blackness that is most frequently associated with white western imperialism" (hooks 93).

5.For an important counter-example, and a powerful complement to James's book, see StuartHall's essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," which simultaneously identifies the differencesbetween Caribbean islands while nevertheless insisting on their similarities (see especially113-5).

6.For an analogous historical reorientation, see Eric Sundquist's essay '"Benito Cereño' and NewWorld Slavery," which emphasizes the importance of the Haitian revolution to debates aroundslavery in the antebellum US and to Melville's novella "Benito Cereño" in particular.

7."New York City, despite its undeniable ethnic segmentation, has by far the highest level of[pan-Caribbean] exchanges through the sheer variety and number of Caribbean peoples in thatcity. Miami, Toronto and Montreal would be next, followed by London, Amsterdam, The Hagueand Paris in that order" (James, "Migration" 257).

8.Haynes finally broke with Marcus Garvey, for example, over the latter's refusal to supportblack activism in support of Ethiopia after Italy's invasion ofthat country in 1935. Penny VonEschen's book, while not mentioning Samuel Haynes specifically, emphasizes the importance ofthe invasion of Ethiopia in the elaboration of modern pan-Africanism, especially through thefounding in London of the International African Service Bureau in London in 1937, led by C.L.R.James, George Padmore, and Jomo Kenyatta (11-7).

9.James does propose an important internationalist dimension to the ABB's disappearance intothe Workers Party (later the CPUSA). Wondering at the attraction of the white left for theseblack radicals, James declares that the WP and CPUSA "were simply the American division ofLenin's international and multinational army of revolutionaries, the Communist International.These black revolutionaries did not join the American party, they had joined the Comintern! Theyhad joined the organization that declared at its founding congress in 1919: 'Colonial slaves ofAfrica and Asia! The hour of the proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hourof your own emancipation!'" (180).

10.Briggs told the HUAC, "I resent being interrogated by a committee whose members includeout-and-out white supremacists and people who have been inciting to insurrection in the Southagainst the Supreme Court's integration mandate, and moreover a committee that during its 20years has never once investigated the Ku Klux Klan" (qtd. in James 159). The remarkable lifeand writings of Richard B. Moore have been presented and collected in Turner and Turner'sRichard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem. Winston James is currently working on apolitical and literary biography of Claude McKay.

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11.Such analyses are also common to intellectual appraisals ofAntonio Gramsci, as well as thoseof C.L.R. James (who, it should be pointed out, did reject the notion of the vanguard party in hismove away from Trotskyism). In Gramsci's case, the Prison Notebooks have been read asendorsing culturalism, postmodernism, and post-Marxism, among other post- 1968 positions, inthe attempt to avoid the now unfashionable Leninist framework of Gramsci's communism.

12.I like to think that this term cannot now be used without the reader hearing an echo ofRaymond Williams's statement that "there are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeingpeople as masses" (300).

13.James argues that Caribbean migrants' views tended to evolve from class consciousness(which "partially explains their 'pioneering' role in 'white' radical organizations such as theAmerican Communist Party") toward race consciousness over time, under pressure from the moreracially inflected politics of the US: "the longer the early Caribbean Socialists and Communistsremained in the United States, the more they became Americanized, the more they movedtowards black nationalist positions, the modal Afro-American racial ideology" (186).

14.In his Epilogue, James does reassert the historical importance of the UNIA within the US:he notes that Elijah Poole (Elijah Muhammad) borrowed extensively from his early Garveyismin developing both the style and the ideology of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X's parents wereboth "staunch Garveyites" (260), James reports, and Malcolm "wore [his Garveyite roots] as ifthey formed a badge of honor" (260). For a powerful collection of essays on Malcolm X/El-HajjMalik El-Shabazz, see Joe Wood's Malcolm X: In Our Own Image.

15.Soon after the publication of James's book, another fine essay on the Afro-Cubans of Tampaand Ybor City appeared, by Nancy Raquel Mirabai, in an important collection of essays onrelations between African Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution, Between Raceand Empire.

16.On the Popular Front, see Michael Denning's magisterial work, The Cultural Front.

17.For instance, the 4 May 1999 issue carried full-page stories on the Congolese civil war; onLiberia; on democratization across sub-Saharan Africa; on the transition to civilian rule inNigeria; and on the need to improve the conditions of African peasant farmers

18.The connection between European territorial colonialism and the oppression ofAfrican Ame-ricans in the US is made most strongly by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton: "There isno 'American dilemma' because black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the inte-rest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with,for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects inrelation to the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism" (5).

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practicein Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989

Bhabha, Homi K. "The Other Question." Mongia 37-54.

Buell, Lawrence. "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon." AmericanLiterary History 4 (1992): 411-42.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation inAmerica. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice ofHistory: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?"Mongia 223-47.

Christian, Barbara. "The Race for Theory." Mongia 148-57.

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Curiel, Barbara Brinson, et al. "Introduction." Post-Nationalist American Studies. Ed. JohnCarlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, forthcoming.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the TwentiethCentury. London: Verso, 1996.

Frankenberg, Ruth, and Lata Mani. "Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, 'Postcoloniality' and thePolitics of Location." Cultural Studies 7 (1993): 292-310 Rpt. in Mongia 347-64.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Mongia 110-21.

hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End P, 1990.

James, Winston. "Migration, Racism and Identity Formation: The Caribbean Experience inBritain." Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. Ed. Winston James and CliveHarris. London: Verso, 1993.

Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC:Duke UP, 1993.

Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. 'Telling Silences and Making Community: Afro-Cubans and African-Americans in Ybor City and Tampa, 1899-1915." Between Race and Empire: African-Americansand Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution. Ed. Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes.Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. 49-69.

Mongia, Padmini, ed. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996.

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. New York: Grove P, 1985.

Sharpe, Jenny. "Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race."Diaspora 4 (1995): 181-99.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. "Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age ofDemocracy."American Quarterly50 (1998): 471-522.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value."Mongia 198-222.

Suleri, Sara. "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition." Mongia 335-46.

Sundquist, Eric. "'Benito Cereño' and New World Slavery." Reconstructing American LiteraryHistory. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 93-122.

Turner, W. Burghardt, and Joyce Moore Turner, eds. Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant inHarlem: Collected Writings, 1920-1972. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Visweswaran, Kamala. "Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S.Racial Formations." Diaspora 6 (1997): 5-29.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.

Wood, Joe, ed. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

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