A “New” Black Nationalism in the USA and France

Black Nationalism has roots in the nineteenth century, when African-American abolitionists and religious leaders deployed strategies to uplift their people out of slavery. As David Walker's appeal demonstrates, early Black Nationalists argued that Blacks were entitled to the same privileges as their White counterparts. In fact, he contended that, by virtue of their labor and suffering, Blacks were more worthy of American citizenship than Whites (Walker and Turner 1993). But David Walker's political philosophy contrasted sharply with other Black Nationalists, notably those who believed that African Americans should establish a state in Africa to lobby against slavery and civilize their “pagan” brothers and sisters (Mudimbe 1988). This kind of Black Nationalism grew extensively after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which mandated states to return runaway slaves to their “owners.” Wilson Moses, who identifies the period between 1850 and 1925 as the golden age of Black Nationalism, suggests that, during this era, Black Nationalism was absolutist, civilizationist, elitist, and based on Christian humanism (Moses 1996). After World War I, new relativist, culturalist, proletarian, and secular tendencies characterized Black Nationalism (Moses 1996). Still, the emigrationist characteristic of Black Nationalism remained, as Marcus Garvey popularized such ideal via the Universal Negro Improvement Association movement (Clark 1973; Barbara and Hill 1988). By the 1960s, Malcolm X became the new symbol of Black Nationalism. Drawing much inspiration from Garvey's UNIA and Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, Malcolm X advocated for self-determination through group solidarity and self-defense against an allegedly White supremacist system (Marable 2011). All and all, by the 1970s, much to Malcolm X's credit, the notion that African Americans should be self-sufficient and build their own institutions, as well as develop their own African-centered intellectual and cultural tradition made up the backbone of contemporary Black Nationalism. But as you shall see in the essay, in the 1990s, Black immigrants complicated the notion of nation and institution building in the Black “community.”

Departmentalization (1946) is a process by which the old colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana became an integral part of France. In 2003, Ramon Grosfoguel (Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley) and I interviewed the late Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the negritude movement and former mayor of Fort-de-France. Césaire had been a staunch proponent of departmentalization. Thus, we asked if he saw a contradiction between his work and advocating for departmentalization. We found that he viewed departmentalization as a mean to secure the flow of capital from France to the French Caribbean. For Césaire, departmentalization was subversive because it forced the French to transfer funds to the French Caribbean; as he said, France had to “aboule le fric” (hand over the money). Simultaneously, Césaire believed in asserting the African roots of his island by creating institutions allowing French Caribbean people to define themselves as they saw fit, an initiative which is in accordance with the tenets of Black Nationalism. Accordingly, one can refer to Césaire's view of departmentalization as “radical integration,” a process wherein integration into the mainstream is a political and economic strategy that does not preclude Black Nationalist ideals from thriving in society.

Here, I define indigenization as the process of becoming native to the land.

Gregory Mann wrote a very important article on the Code de L'indigénat. He describes the code as “A ‘regime of exception’ based on rule by decree, enacted in often arbitrary and sometimes spectacular punishments, and concerned primarily with asserting administrative power, the indigénat was first established in Algeria in 1881. Its use spread across the empire of the Third Republic: a regime of administrative sanctions based on the Algerian model was extended to Senegal in 1887 and to the newly created federation of French West Africa (AOF) in 1904” (Mann 2009, p. 333).

The Fédération des étudiants d'Afrique noire en France (FEANF) was created in 1950.

One should note that, in Culture and Stigma: Race, Ethnicity and Class in Black America, Lorand Matory (2012) offers an interesting perspective on ethnic diversity and competition in the African Diaspora of the USA.

See http://​rapadoo.​com/​.

See http://​www.​kiskeacity.​com/​.

Fish also writes that, “Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services … and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.” In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions—questions of negligence law—are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that runoff from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don't you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory's operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?”