Western scholarship denied any coherent tradition connecting Black rebellions across continents

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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lists the scattered resistance events that the Black radical tradition unifies — the empirical ground of Robinson’s core definition.