This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

This chapter focuses on Captain Harry Foster Dean, a Black sea captain who has been largely forgotten but belongs to a lineage of Black Americans active in African repatriation movements from at least the early nineteenth century onward. Dean’s entire life was driven by the spirit of what we may call maritime Pan-Africanism—a variant of Pan-Africanism built upon aspirations of maritime capability. This chapter reveals what Marcus Garvey’s more familiar program, symbolized by the Black Star Line, can tell us about Dean’s significance to both Black Oceanic studies and the study of empire.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

The fourth chapter investigates the years from mid-1961 until King’s assassination in 1968, a period characterized by his intensified and prophetic engagement with Africa. King’s advocacy expanded to encompass robust support for anticolonial movements, initiatives to halt internal African conflicts, lobbying for US development aid, and the creation of scholarship opportunities for African students in American universities. His leadership within the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) is presented as instrumental in amplifying these efforts. The chapter situates King’s embrace of Africa within a broader historical and ideological context, drawing parallels to W. E. B. Du Bois and underscoring the enduring significance of King’s Pan-African vision for contemporary discourse on the Black World and Africa.

Spanning the years 1929 to 1954, Chapter 1 meticulously traces the evolution of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Black transnational consciousness from his formative years through his doctoral studies at Boston University. Emphasizing the profound impact of familial and ecclesiastical influences – most notably his father, Daddy King, Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and the philosophical writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi – this chapter reveals how King’s upbringing in a home and church environment fostered an abiding commitment to racial justice and global affairs, with a particular focus on Africa. The analysis foregrounds the political, economic, legal, cultural, religious, social, and intellectual forces that shaped King’s nascent internationalist and Pan-Africanist inclinations, collectively termed his “Beloved Pan-Africanism.”

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp discuss regional rights projects through which Latin American and African state and non-state actors tried, with limited success, to position their regions competitively in a politically and economically decolonizing world, even as European regional rights projects shored up the political and economic sovereignty of European states, both at home and in overseas territories. While regional projects invested human rights with local meanings, which was key to their acceptance and adoption across regions, they mostly failed to create the world of non-domination that postcolonial states pursued.

This chapter surveys the history of Pan-Africanism as an aesthetic current that paralleled more formalized political solidarity. The chapter asserts that differences across languages and periods complicate Pan-Africanism’s intellectual history. With particular attention to the diversity of origins, it shows how pre-independence African ties with the diaspora fed into continental initiatives along linguistic lines. While the anglophone tradition emerged in close alignment with African American writers, particularly Langston Hughes, the shared roots in negritude between francophone African and Caribbean writers were productive and provocative, lusophone alignments emerged through continent-based anthologies, and arabophone literatures were interpreted through Pan-Arab as well as Pan-African formations. Given the transnational dimension, African languages have figured less prominently in Pan-African literature. In more recent times, feminism, decolonial imperatives, and changes in publishing and educational institutions have been influential. The tensions between Pan-Africanism and other intellectual traditions remain fertile ground for future scholarship.

From its “Golden Age” in Paris during the interwar years, to its subsequent rearticulations and revisions in the following decades, negritude has remained something of a moving target for literary-historical inquiry while garnering significant criticism, especially leading up to and in the immediate wake of formal decolonization. This chapter reconsiders negritude’s contested origins and complex trajectory through African and Afro-diasporic thought, identifying suggestive new lexical sources for this supposed neologism that stand to shed light on the underappreciated “oracular” or “prophetic” dimensions of negritude. It argues for the enduring relevance of negritude as a key site for articulations of blackness in French and as a horizon for African literature more broadly.

When Cheikh Anta Diop suggested, in 1951, that ancient Egypt had been a black civilization, this was the start of a lifelong commitment to researching, arguing, and defending this idea. His work has since opened up and provided contexts for discussions dating back to antiquity, controversially pushing back against long-held, sometimes wrong-headed imperial notions such as that Western philosophy began in Greece. He seeks to recenter and restore meaning to an Africa uniquely severed from precolonial origins.

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.

James Aggrey was the most influential pan-Africanist in the Anglophone African world in the 1920s and was the single greatest influence on the early leaders of the African Association (AA). This chapter does a deep dive into Aggrey’s intellectual biography and his connection to the AA to argue that Aggrey transmitted Ethiopianist ideas to East Africans. It carefully examines the life of this remarkable global African intellectual by investigating the Gold Coast political milieu of his youth, his educational formation in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church in the American South, and his time in New York at Columbia and as a member of the Negro Society for Historical Research. It argues that Aggrey helped directly tie East Africans in the 1920s into a network of black thought that shaped their understanding of African identity and their role in the continent’s past and future, inspiring some of them to become redemptive pan-Africanists.

Julius Nyerere was one of the greatest African thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century, but until now, no one has looked at how his time in the African Association (AA), before he left for Europe, connected him to a whole world of black thought and shaped his intellectual biography. After demonstrating the lessons Nyerere learned about African unity from the AA and figures like James Aggrey, it will demonstrate how he remolded and used these ideas, and how the strands of both practical pan-Africanism and Ethiopianist-inspired redemptive pan-Africanism can be seen throughout his career. It explores how his ideas of umoja shaped both domestic and international policies in postcolonial Tanzania including the relationship between religion and politics. It then examines how Nyerere wrestled with ideas of African identity, unity, and Africanness (Uarikfa) and highlights the inherent tensions between projects of territorial nationalism and political pan-Africanisms such as African nationalism.

The introduction engages scholarly debates around the topics of Tanzanian nationalism, African identity, pan-Africanism, and global intellectual history to indicate its contributions to those fields. It introduces the main question: How did an African identity come to have any personal or political purchase in East Africa in the twentieth century? The main case study focuses on the African Association (AA), a politically minded pan-African group with ideational connections to several streams of black thought. The members who chose this group, which promoted an African identity, usually did so for two reasons. They were either inspired by the redemptive pan-Africanism of some of its visionary leaders who engaged with the ideas of Ethiopianism surrounding Africa’s future and past and/or they were drawn to the strand of practical pan-Africanism cultivated by the leadership of the AA who sought to build African unity and open chapters all throughout the continent and even the globe.

Paul Sindi Seme is a little-known pan-Africanist but was the chief architect and popularizer of the African Association (AA)’s vision of continental and global expansion in the 1930s and 1940s through a vast network of correspondence. During this period, the AA attempted to spread the ideas of redemptive and practical pan-Africanism deeper into the interior of Africa by building a material circuit of ideas which they hoped would expand to all Africans across the globe. The practical work of building the African nation came through the mastery of the postal system, the circulation of statute books and membership forms, and the creation of regional conferences. Seme was not only a prolific letter writer but also completed several book manuscripts including the first history of East Africa written in an African language by an African (c.1937). This chapter analyzes his writings to demonstrate how his vision was influenced by Ethiopianism and redemptive pan-Africanism.

An intellectual history approach to the exploration of African identity in mid twentieth-century East Africa provides several insights into unresolved tensions in African political history. Building the African Nation argues that the failure of the Pan-African Movement to politically unify the continent in the heady days of the end of empire in the late 1950s and early 1960s should be partly attributed to the fact that competing nationalisms were at play. African and territorial nationalisms were vying for the loyalty of the people of the continent. Even though the relationship between the two proved to be beneficial to the aims of some territorial nationalists in solving specific problems – coordination of anti-colonial tactics, sharing of information valuable to decolonization projects, etc. – in the end, there were two separate identities aiming for ultimate allegiance. In hindsight, we can see that trying to build two nations simultaneously was bound to create tension or conflict and is one reason African political unity has proven so elusive. When we recognize that much pan-African thinking in the continent was born out of the idea that all Africans were one and should therefore prioritize a continental fealty, it becomes easier to understand how this made pan-Africanism at odds with territorial nationalists’ projects.