anticolonialism, gender, and the popular front

I finished Race Against Empire approximately three minutes ago. It's a well-researched and powerful book and i really should have read it three and change years ago while i wasn't going to my computer science class and was dreading having to sit through Paul Fry's execrably arrogant and hypocritical Lit Theory lectures (I'm almost proud of the C+ i got in that class.) Enough about me.

Eschen traces the trajectories of a transnational afrodiasporic laborist anticolonialism during the late 1930s and early-mid 1940s, hegemonic not only among left scholars and activists like Paul Robeson and Alphaeus Hunton and (until his ant-communist turn in 1950) George Padmore, but also among NAACP liberals like Walter White and Channing Tobias. That this anticolonialism is contemporary with the cultural formations Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front seems not particularly coincidental, and Eschen makes this point clearly. One of the most interesting arguments Eschen makes is that while this movement is hegemonic among activists in the African diaspora, it briefly disrupts the gendering of Africa as "motherland/fatherland" and instead pushes folks to look critically at Africa as a site of exploitation of black workers by colonial powers and American corporations, in the process opening a space for women to become leaders in the anticolonial movement, but this space and this disruption are effectively closed by the repressive and racist surveillance politics of Cold War Manichaeism, which attemps to silence and obscure the voices of the loudest proponents of this Internationalism, like Hunton, Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all of whom have their passports removed by the United States government to proevent them from traveling to Africa and elsewhere in the "third world" and disrupting the U.S. state project of minimizing the visibility of U.S. racism towards African Americans to Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians in the "third world." While this state project is ultimately a failure, the repression visited against activists attempting to foster this anticolonialist internationalism shatters it, although Eschen argues in her conclusion that while the next generation - the black U.S. New Left - was forced to reinvent the whell to some extent, they, from Malcom X to the Black Panthers to Dr. King, also to some extent interacted with this tradition's footprints, even if figures like Hunton, and the importance of Robeson, were tragically forgotten.

So, what kinds of connections are we building?

Bleh, it's too early in the morning for me to be comprehensible. Next up on the reading list is Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, which Katie recommended, so i'm sure it's pretty good.