Robin D. G. Kelley

Unfinished migrations : Reflections on the African diaspora and the making of the modern world

Abstract: This article engages the very definition/meaning of diaspora as a concept at a moment when scholars are rushing to embrace the field of diaspora studies. Much of the current discussion continues to suggest that diaspora is merely a logical manifestation of dispersion, no matter how the diaspora was created or how long it had been in existence. This essay argues that linkages that tie the diaspora together must be articulated and are not inevitable, and that the diaspora is both process and condition. As a process it is always in the making, and as condition it is situated within global race and gender hierarchies. However, just as the diaspora is made, it can be unmade, and thus scholars must explore the moments of its unmaking. Indeed, the efforts to unravel the constituent elements of the diaspora(s) raise significant questions concerning how Africa is conceptualized in relation to its diaspora. These efforts also underscore the need to examine overlapping diasporas from many historical locations.

“Unfinished Migrations”: Commentary and Response

With “Unfinished Migrations,” Patterson and Kelley have provided an indispensable overview of the recent resurgence of African diaspora scholarship. Describing this “rebirth” in light of contemporary concerns with globalization and transnationalism, they usefully update the work of scholars such as St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and George Shepperson, who over the past thirty-five years have provided similar catalogues and calls. Rather than contest any particular element of their overview, I will focus briefly on what I consider to be some crucial issues of epistemological strategy raised by their salutary attempt to conceptualize a “theoretical framework… that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis.” The first is that we need to consider in more detail the genealogy of the term diaspora itself. Patterson and Kelley are correct to note that “attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself,” but surely it is also significant that the term diaspora has been appropriated so recently in black intellectual discourse. Writers and activists including Equiano, Blyden, Delany, Du Bois, and Nardal proposed varying visions of internationalism over the past two centuries, but only in the past three decades have black intellectuals turned to an explicit discourse of an “African diaspora.” It seems to me that we need to be able to explain why this term arises, as Patterson and Kelley point out, only in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans

PREFACE 1. The First Passage: 1502-1617 2. Strange New Land:1617-1776 3. Revolutionary Citizens:1776-1804 4. Let My People Go:1804-1860 5. Breaking The Chains:1860-1880 6. Though Justice Sleeps:1880-1900 7. A Chance To Make Good: 1900-1929 8. A New Deal?: 1929-1945 9. We Changed The World:1945-1970 10. Into The Fire:1970 to Present CHRONOLOGY FURTHER READING INDEX

How the West was One: On the uses and Limitations of Diaspora

fully well that the concept of an African diaspora is hardly new. Even if we limit our discussion to scholarly investigations of the African diaspora, we will discover a rich discourse dating back at least to the 1950s and 1960s, if not before. It served as both a political term with which to emphasize unifying experiences of African peoples dispersed by the slave trade, and an analytical term that enabled scholars to talk about

Building a Progressive Movement in 2012

Despite the uprisings of 2011, racism and the surprising resilience of the extreme Right have prevailed, attacking reproductive rights, voting rights, civil liberties, and promoting a neoliberal agenda of privatization and austerity. Because both parties embrace neoliberalism as the solution to economic crises, most on the Left agree that we need to rebuild an independent progressive movement able to defend working people and the poor, challenge racism, sexism, and homophobia, and halt the erosion of basic rights. This article argues that youth of color are building such a movement, and provides examples of contemporary movements, most notably the L.A.-based Community Rights campaign to resist criminalization of black and brown kids, break the school-to-prison pipeline, and to demilitarize schools.

A new war in Dixie: Communists and the unemployed in Birmingham, Alabama, 1930–1933

Conditions were so bad that many people believed that the only way they could ever get better was to start a new war. As I read the handbill I very naively was under the impression that the Unemployed Council was calling all Negro and white workers to a new war. Angelo Herndon1 You up against the wall and no way you can go but come out forwards. You had to come out in the struggle. But was a whole lot of people was afraid. Hosea Hudson2

Remapping the U.S. Left

Review of Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left by Paul Buhle. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.