This article addresses recent work on empire and colonisation which calls for a reappraisal of how agency and resistance manifests among groups responding to structural marginalisation. We argue that approaching these questions from within the colonial order reveals important idiosyncrasies regarding how groups understood resistance, agency, and popular organising as possible responses that emerged from within imperial landscapes. Using the example of race as a central regulatory category and practice of colonial power, we analyse two cases which we suggest benefit from an account of agency and resistance within colonial order: the Black Loyalists in English America and the Indigenous royalists of New Granada, two groups which pursued emancipation by choosing to remain under colonial rule. The resulting analysis produces a more dynamic account of resistance and emancipation which responds to the far-reaching influence of colonial order for resistance movements at local, national, and international levels. This account contributes to recent debates which call for theoretical analysis of “middle actors” and popular thinking as it relates to international politics, postcolonial movements, and studies of empire.

In an effort to address the dearth of literature regarding how African American political theorists have historically interpreted the meaning of Native political experience to make sense of their own, we chart what four influential New World Black writers, from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, say about Native Americans. While there is some diversity among the particular interpretive foci of these historical works, each generally invokes Native Americans as having a shared experience of oppression with Blacks that warrants resistance; being crushed by circumstances in which African-descended people have survived and thrived; exemplifying oppression that has no redemptive power; providing evidence of the ongoing possibility of Black extinction; and as racially inferior to Blacks and thus in need of Black ladies’ supposedly civilizing qualities. This paper uses these historical Africana perspectives on Indigenous and Black relations to explore the political implications of forging individual and shared identities at the intersection of race and gender.