Western scholarship’s denial of Black radicalism served an ideology that obliterated the African

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Black radical tradition challenged Western radicalism’s assumptions about capitalism and ideology; Western scholars long denied any coherent tradition of Black radicalism — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 393; The Black radical tradition springs from a conserved African worldview under enslavement (+5 more)

Related

• Western scholars long denied any coherent tradition of Black radicalism (similarity 0.91)
• The Black radical tradition challenged Western radicalism’s assumptions about capitalism and ideology (similarity 0.91)
• Black radicalism is a distinct tradition, not a Black variant of Western radicalism (similarity 0.90)
• Black radicalism is an autonomous African response, not a Black variant of Western radicalism (similarity 0.90)
• The tradition let Black thinkers reject Western radicalism’s universal claims (similarity 0.89)
• Western scholarship denied any coherent tradition connecting Black rebellions across continents (similarity 0.89)
• Black radicalism is transcending nationalism and class struggle for its own authority (similarity 0.87)
• Black radical thought derives from a shared epistemology among diverse African peoples. (similarity 0.87)
• The Black Radical Tradition accreted collective intelligence from generations of slave struggle (similarity 0.86)
• The Black radical tradition originates in conserved African metaphysics transmitted as culture (similarity 0.86)
• African heritage, not slavery, defined the Black condition (similarity 0.86)
• Genovese dismissed the Black radical tradition as a myth fed by white radicals. (similarity 0.85)
• An African tradition grounded Black resistance from 1550 to 1850 (similarity 0.84)
• Black radical historiography was founded by Western-educated Black petit-bourgeois intellectuals (similarity 0.84)
• The Black radical tradition is rooted in African metaphysical consciousness, not plantation experience (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Western scholars long denied any coherent tradition of Black radicalism #corroborates (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 393
• The Black radical tradition springs from a conserved African worldview under enslavement #expands (0.70)
• Pre-war Western thought deemed African belief illogical idolatry #exemplifies (0.65)
• The Black radical tradition challenged Western radicalism’s assumptions about capitalism and ideology #expands (0.60)
• Black radicalism is an autonomous African response, not a Black variant of Western radicalism #expands (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 395
• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt #expands (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 474