This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

While “Africa” historically figured as a fulcrum in African American literature for interrogating Blacks’ sociopolitical status in America, by the 1930s this relation had distinctly sharpened. Black American responses to the Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–36) and to Marcus Garvey’s failed populist “Back to Africa” campaign demonstrate how the 1930s marked a crucible in Black radical thought: civil and economic rights took on a global cast; colonialism and imperialism were read as patterned acts of aggression against Black and brown people; and US segregation emerged as yet another name for and variation on fascism. By the 1930s, Black Leftists almost obsessively attended to the racialized failures and frustrations of this historical moment in an effort to imagine and articulate new, pragmatic, and at times revolutionary strategies for addressing the Negro problem on a domestic and a global scale. The 1930s are bookmarked by attempts to both historicize Blackness and Black achievements on a micro and macro scale and concurrently imagine a way forward toward democracy.

Chapter 8 goes back to Antonio Campobasso, the author of Nero di Puglia, in order to reflect on the genesis and the reception of the book and explore the identities of the war children of color through the testimonies of some members of this group whom I was able to interview. This chapter focuses in particular on the meaning of the search for their fathers and on the plural identities that they built for themselves, foregrounding the value that they assign to their African American ancestry.

This chapter frames the OSPAAAL within the longer historical arc of the interwar League Against Imperialism (LAI). It argues that the OSPAAAL recovered five major ideological tendencies of the LAI’s understudied Americas-based section, the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (La liga anti-imperialista de las Américas, LADLA), created in Mexico City in 1925. Despite the similarities of the political projects of these organizations, they exhibited a major difference in that the LADLA, in its early years, demonstrated less commitment to Black struggles in the Americas and was more focused on organizing with Indigenous communities. Through fashioning itself as a non-race-based global movement that prioritized Black struggles, the OSPAAAL aimed to correct this limitation of its predecessor. However, although the OSPAAAL focused on Black struggles from its inception, it did so largely with respect to African Americans in the United States and South Africa, repeating the tendency of its predecessor to elide the problems of anti-Black racism in Latin America.

The concluding two chapters take up cultural responses to the ongoing violence perpetuated by mass incarceration and the global cycles of warfare and terror. Dennis R. Childs examines narratives of immobility based on police and state violence, imprisonment, and detention and deportation at national borders. He argues that “anti-carceral hip-hop” is the “aesthetic practice [that] represents the quintessential storytelling method for those most commonly targeted for police killing and imprisonment.” Reading hip-hop narratives within a “long twenty-first century” of radical literary, political, and musical practices since the 1970s, he links recent works by Dead Prez, Reyna Grande, Ann Jaramillo, Kendrick Lamar, Monifa Love, Main Source, Invincible, and Askari X to those of James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Public Enemy, Chester Himes, George Jackson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X.