Chapter 11 - London, New York, and the Black Bolshevik Renaissance: Radical Black Internationalism during the New Negro Renaissance

Summary

This chapater considers the interplay between black political and cultural activists in Britain and the USA during the New Negro era and the creation of black internationalist networks as a subset of what the author calls the Black Bolshevik Renaissance. These networks significantly inflected the trajectory of black radicalism in the USA and the UK (and the Caribbean and Africa) from the New Negro Renaissance through the Popular Front era to the Black Arts and Black Power moment of the 1960s and 1970s. A significant focus here will be how this internationalism decentered notions of what we might now call a “Black Atlantic” or the “Atlantic World,” emphasizing building and strengthening the relationships of Africa and African Diasporic communities to non-European peoples in European and North American colonies and semi-colonies of “the East,” anticipating what many US Black political and cultural radicals would later term the “Bandung World.”