Western scholars long denied any coherent tradition of Black radicalism

Evidence

Before the African and New World Black liberation movements of the post–Second World War era, few Western scholars of the African experience had any conception of the existence of an ideologically based or epistemologically coherent historical tradition of Black radicalism. The presence of such a tradition, the possibilities and conditions of its existence were literally and configuratively alien to these observers. Given the presumptions these students of Africa and its diaspora made about the bases of the identities, cultures, ethnicities, and group formations of these various African peoples, neither space nor time, geography nor periodicity, led them to suspect the presence of such a tradition. In its stead, these observers reconstructed social and ideological movements among Blacks to conform to the exigencies of specific locales and of immediate social causes. If in their minds such movements occasionally were allowed some resemblance to one another, this followed from the fact of a general racial order shared by most Blacks, whether as slaves or ex-slaves, rather than the presence of a historical or political consciousness or a social tradition among Blacks. An ideological connective was presumed remote between the African mutineers on the Amistad or the captors of the Diane; the maroon settlements in Pernambuco, Florida, Virginia, Jamaica, the Guianas, and the Carolinas; the slave revolutionists of the Revolution in Haiti; the slave insurrectionists of the Caribbean and early nineteenth-century America; the Black rebels of the regions of the Great Fish River, the Limpopo and the Zambezi in southern Africa; the Black emigrationists of the American antebellum period; the untolled wars across the African landscape in the 1800s and 1900s; and their twentieth-century successors in Africa and the diaspora. … These events were seen as geographically and historically bounded acts, episodes connected categorically by the similarity of their sociological elements (e.g., slave or colonial societies) but evidently unrelated in the sense of any emerging social movement inspired by historical experience and a social ideology. Such scholarship, of course, was either inspired or at least influenced by the ideological requirement that modern Western thought obliterate the African. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 393

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the core thesis — the existence of a suppressed Black radical tradition — that the reader’s stated research question on the tradition’s rise and fall directly needs; connects to Robinson’s larger argument contrasting Western scholarship with Black historical consciousness. — connects to: The tradition let Black thinkers reject Western radicalism’s universal claims; The radical intelligentsia found, not invented, the Black Radical Tradition; Black radicalism matured largely unconscious of itself as a unified tradition (+24 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 393

Broader Connections

• Genovese dismissed the Black radical tradition as a myth fed by white radicals. #exemplifies (0.70)
• The tradition let Black thinkers reject Western radicalism’s universal claims #expands (0.60)
• Academic historians led the reactionary assault on Reconstruction and Black history #exemplifies (0.60)
• Black radicalism is an autonomous African response, not a Black variant of Western radicalism #expands (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 395
• Both Marxists and academics suppressed Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction for decades #corroborates (0.55)
• Black radicalism matured largely unconscious of itself as a unified tradition #qualifies (0.50)
• Black radical theory was discovered in mass movements, not invented #expands (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 22
• Cesaire broke with the Communist Party to prioritize Black liberation over doctrine. #exemplifies (0.50)
• The Black radical tradition derives from its own cultural synthesis, not imported theory. #qualifies (0.50)
• The Black masses, not the intelligentsia, were the true source of the tradition. #qualifies (0.50)
• The Black radical tradition springs from a conserved African worldview under enslavement #expands (0.45)
• Surrealism served Black radicals as recognition, not invention #expands (0.45)
• The Black radical movement’s historical force exceeded Marxism’s analytical vocabulary. #expands (0.45)
• Garvey’s mass movement drew on an older Black nationalist tradition #exemplifies (0.45)
• The radical intelligentsia found, not invented, the Black Radical Tradition #corroborates (0.40)