This chapter examines the past decade of organizing against the carceral state under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” (BLM). It draws on my collaborative research with Color Of Change and the movement for transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing for gendered violence. I look at recent BLM mobilizations through three lenses. One tracks BLM’s macro-level gains for community power at the situational, institutional, and systemic levels. Another documents the micro-level psychological empowerment processes of Black queer feminist approaches that center Black joy, political education, and care for Black women. Lastly, I look at the meso-level organizational settings that bridge individual psychological empowerment and capacity-building with macro-level outcomes like policy changes and culture shifts. Drawing on Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa’s concept of the “prism” (2021), I coin the term “Black prism” to describe organizations like Color Of Change that build political homes to amplify the power of Black constituents.

This chapter explores how Black youth in the British colony of Bermuda engaged decolonization, Black Power, and Black internationalism through Reggae, Dancehall, and sound system culture in the “global 1990s.” Centered on a racially charged 1995 referendum on independence in which, out of 58.8 percent of eligible voters, 73.6 percent voted against and 25.7 percent voted for independence, it argues that it is critical to explore Black anticolonialism through soundscapes and not just ballot politics, as Black Bermuda is a sonic culture. The era’s Reggae sound system clashes often invoked long-standing racial and colonial tensions, such as one between Bermuda’s Souljah One and British DJ David Rodigan. Through archives drawn from print media, government surveillance, and audio recordings, it shows that while sound system culture could not “free decolonization,” it played a crucial role in galvanizing the Black and working-class Progressive Labor Party’s youth base in its first political victory in 1998.

This introduction maps out the local, national, regional and world-historical implications and motivations for Arming Black Consciousness. It begins with an examination of Khotso Seatlholo and his motivations for joining and leading the Soweto Uprising in 1976. It then moves to a discussion of how little we know about the armed wings of the Black Consciousness Movement, suggests some reasons why and engages with Steve Biko and his coyness around the question of armed struggle. The introduce then proceeds to map out the importance of the Haitian Revolution to the theoretical concept of the Black Radical Tradition and African Liberation Struggles. This is a perspective that is not engaged with much in the literature on the liberation struggles in Africa so some detail is given to its intricacies here. This is followed by a brief literature review on Black Consciousness, armed struggle, Black Power and some engagement with the Cold War. The introduction closes by discussing the importance in centring Black women in these narratives of revolution, makes some interventions around methodology and then discusses the various sources used to construct this narrative.

This chapter examines the history of Black diasporic fiction in the Atlantic world as it informed, and continues to be informed by, the artistic and geopolitical coordinates of the surrealist movement. From the surrealist interest in and appropriation of Blackness in Jazz-age Paris through the post-WWII development of pan-African and Third World movements, the writing and cultural production of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American intellectuals fuelled the global development of leftist and anti-colonial politics. So too did Black writing and art both inform and, in part, constitute the proliferation of aesthetic radicalism throughout the Atlantic world. This chapter traces the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition through the production of fiction; in doing so it traces the politics of literary activism – as well as the vexed histories of racism, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and erasure – in the work of Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It contends not only that surrealism should be understood as a significant coordinate in the Black radical tradition (as e.g. Robin D.G. Kelley has demonstrated), but also that the surrealist movement is inconceivable without an appraisal of its relation to race, diaspora, and the writing and cultural production of Black intellectuals.

This chapter calls upon both black southern feminist and indigenous critiques to wrestle with the legacy of Du Bois's black slave-as-worker thesis. Without discounting the world-historical value of Du Bois’s revision of Marx’s universal subject, this chapter puts pressure on the analytic dominance associated with the productive labor of the dark proletariat by asking the following question: what would happen to the future potentialities of the black radical tradition if we reassessed black radical historiography and its genealogies of resistance through the subjugated knowledges of southern black and indigenous women? Arguing for a reassessment of the revolutionary analytic of labor drawn from those whose subject positions remain peripheral to Du Bois’s imagined solidarity among the “basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and white,” this chapter examines a subversive black southern-inter/nationalist feminist literary tradition that troubles the emancipatory claims drawn from the now normative coupling of “blackness and labor” in order to activate futures that are unrealizable in the current terms of order.