Chapter 2 scrutinizes the period from 1954 to 1957, illuminating King’s evolving perspective on Africa and the cause of African liberation from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to his pivotal journey to Ghana. During these transformative years, King waged parallel struggles for freedom on American and African fronts, confronting a relentless campaign by US authorities – including the FBI – against civil rights leaders and organizations. This chapter explores King’s emergence as a formidable advocate for racial justice, a burgeoning Africanist, and a Pan-African thinker. It highlights his insistence on connecting the African American freedom movement with the broader struggles of African peoples, and his conviction that African Americans should boldly support the global quest for African independence. King’s analysis of the reciprocal influences between African liberation movements and Black American activism is given particular emphasis.

Chapter 5 offers a critical reappraisal of King’s Pan-Africanist credentials, challenging prevailing interpretations that downplay his alignment with Pan-Africanist thought. While some, like George M. Houser, have argued that King was not fundamentally a Pan-Africanist, and others, such as Lewis Baldwin, have emphasized his integrationist leanings, this chapter contends that King’s extensive advocacy for African independence and unity positions him squarely within the Pan-African tradition. Through a nuanced exploration of definitional debates and King’s unique approach, the chapter invites renewed scholarly discussion regarding his place in the broader history of Pan-African theory and praxis, revealing how his vision both reflected and shaped the perspectives of Black Americans in his era.

Focusing on the field’s structure, this chapter shows that African journalists use the ethnic conflict frame to cover African atrocities. This frame is deployed by African journalists even though they and scholars argue that it is stereotypical and oversimplifies complex social processes. This chapter contextualizes its use within Africa while pushing against simplistic readings of its existence. It argues that this frame engages in the politics of who is African while relying on specific collective memories about political manipulation of identity, colonial subjugation, and the war on terror discourse.

This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.

This is an exploration to understand and appreciate another aspect of Yoruba art – the textile – through an interrogation of textiles “as an intelligence” with corroborative references to other scholars. Given that Yoruba textiles are adorned till date, most importantly in their rich varieties, the chapter is filled with enough material evidence to sustain a debate aimed at establishing the beauty and creativity inherent in African culture through the textiles. In this chapter, the “readability” and “intelligibility” of Yoruba textiles is established, with its peculiarity seen as an ambassador of the Yoruba culture. In addition, the importance of textile as a craft, which, by virtue of the peculiarity of its making, portrays the Yoruba art and provides a history of textiles in Africa, is drawn on. Historically too, the chapter shows that Yoruba textiles also contribute to premises that counter the Western assumption that Africa is backward.

The period 1960–2010 was a time of marked immigration into the UK from Commonwealth countries, either to fill employment gaps in the UK or to escape hostilities and conflict as many Commonwealth countries secured independence. The political climate of the UK; attitudes to immigration and cultural integration; the evolution of mental health sciences, including British psychiatry and the Royal College; the emerging research evidence; and the controversies around why migrants and minorities appeared to have higher incidence rates of severe mental illness and poorer outcomes were, and are still, all interrelated and contribute to the lives of minorities. In the 1970s, as a community, Black African Caribbean people of the Windrush generation were concerned about their children getting police attention, which occurred in a racist and political climate of oppression. More than sixty years later, the situation has escalated and diversified so that illegal drugs, gangs and violent crime are now stereotyped as ‘Black culture’. Inequalities generated by the education and criminal justice systems, early years care and employment practices are a backdrop against which the mental health systems are positioned to respond to societal harms to the marginalised.

We remember Ira Aldridge today as the first black Shakespearean to achieve international professional renown. Indeed, he’s the first American actor to do so. Throughout his life Aldridge was lauded with awards. Born to free blacks in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, naturalized as a British citizen in 1863, and buried in Łódź, Poland in 1867, Aldridge’s cosmopolitan life was marked by triumphs as well as persistent racist responses to his performances. His cosmopolitan career spanned three continents and countless theatres. This essay surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: educate; emulate; circulate; nominate; innovate; disseminate; elaborate. Such strategies can still inspire us, students, performers, scholars, artists, teachers, and innovators alike.

This chapter focuses on eight historical developments identified as contexts for legitimised violence in Spanish America. These include the wars of conquest, which Spaniards legitimised through ‘factual’ arguments, such as combating barbarity and bringing civility to indigenous peoples; the Spiritual Conquest of indigenous peoples and the associated activities of the Spanish Inquisition, both of which sometimes featured violence as a means to suppress what Spaniard categorised as heresy and idolatry; hemispheric slavery and its dehumanising nature, which left African and African-descended peoples vulnerable to violence; violence towards all women, but particularly towards indigenous and African women; and finally, state-sanctioned violence used as a tool to suppress ‘revolts’, which were often the product of European anxieties regarding colonial subjects. It is argued that the twin threads of violence that strung these developments together were the promise of wealth and status combined with an ideology of justification for committing violence. Acts of violence that historians might view as being homicidal, personal, arbitrary or contrary to Spanish law could, in fact, be justified, legitimised and committed with impunity in the name of ‘civilising’, with particularly horrific consequences for indigenous peoples throughout Spanish America.

This chapter examines how black and Asian writers established themselves as active participants in wider print culture in the early twentieth century. As the heart of empire, Britain was home to a range of intellectuals, writers, and journalists who expressed their often diverse and sometimes subversive political perspectives through various outlets, including periodicals such as The Islamic Review. This analysis explores the modes and means by which the Egyptian-British Duse Mohamed Ali, founding editor of the African Times and Orient Review, made inroads into fulfilling his ambition to shift thinking on issues of race and representation through the impact of print culture. The chapter also discusses the Indian Olive Christian Malvery’s photo-journalistic piece The Soul Market (1907), a narrative which provides interesting reflections and representations of the underclasses in London’s East End. Partially echoing what was already a familiar discourse on early twentieth-century reform, Malvery’s work, like Ali’s, reveals the complexity of her cultural and political affiliations and exposes the contradictions underlying her seemingly uncomplicated Anglophile voice and persona.