Cedric J. Robinson — Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

348 published claims from this book.

• A daughter’s maquis service nullified paternal demands for virginity
• A guerrilla movement becomes unliquidatable once it becomes the people’s way of life.
• A guerrilla’s power rests in incarnating the whole people’s resistance
• A Jew who experienced anti-Semitism can still be racist toward Negroes
• A settler’s street riot in Algiers compelled France’s government to abandon negotiations
• A small armed population draws its strength from a worldwide revolutionary movement
• Accepting French medicine trapped the colonized within the whole colonial system
• Affirming Europeans’ free choice to leave defuses their colonial anxiety and enables honest dialogue
• Agrarian production roles determine gender hierarchy within Algerian families
• Algeria’s 1954 armed uprising responded to a chain of prior global revolutions
• Algeria’s European settlers feared expulsion more than anything else
• Algeria’s Europeans grew conscious of Algerian nationality during the Revolution
• Algeria’s revolution was won by mass civilian struggle, not by guerrilla arms.
• Algerian colonization conscripted ordinary European settlers into the repressive system
• Algerian combatants diverted resources to save a wounded French prisoner
• Algerian combatants risked lives to obtain medicine for captured French prisoners
• Algerian deaths in hospitals were read as deliberate European murder.
• Algerian doctors were reintegrated into the people when they joined the revolution
• Algerian fidaïs chose revolutionary life rather than courting death.
• Algerian girls experienced only two life stages, omitting the Western period of puberty
• Algerian guerrilla warfare became the prototype studied by liberation movements worldwide
• Algerian Jews publicly repudiated French nationality to join the independence struggle
• Algerian Jews were caught between European and Muslim worlds
• Algerian leadership bombed Radio-Alger but failed to silence it permanently
• Algerian liberation struggle itself forged new gender values preceding independence
• Algerian listeners collectively reconstructed and even invented the Voice’s news
• Algerian national consciousness arose from collective suffering, not party-led independence
• Algerian national consciousness preceded rather than followed political independence
• Algerian nationhood became an embodied reality inside each new Algerian
• Algerian patients conceive disease as single assault requiring one-shot cure
• Algerian popular belief attributes any illness to the action of a bad djinn.
• Algerian radio adoption bypassed technical stages due to absence of electricity
• Algerian refusal of hospital care delayed treatment until death was nearly certain.
• Algerian revolutionary leaders knew captured women would be tortured to death
• Algerian revolutionary leaders weighed three distinct political and moral concerns against retaliation.
• Algerian settlers never betrayed F.L.N. contacts to French authorities
• Algerian society autonomously reappropriated the radio as a weapon of revolution
• Algerian society refused radio because it was modeled on Western family norms
• Algerian society was never the womanless society colonialists described
• Algerian trust in French hospitals surged once an Algerian doctor commanded the decision.
• Algerian willingness to use French hospitals changed when orders came from maquis doctors
• Algerian women gained consultation in marriage choice and shed shame-based avoidance patterns
• Algerian women regrouped in camps turned displacement into revolutionary political organization
• Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling
• Algerian women’s militant action exceeded the resistance-fighter comparison
• Algerian women’s traditional seclusion made them the hardest nucleus of anti-colonial resistance
• Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program
• Algerians accepted French hospital treatment only when Algerian doctors approved it
• Algerians collectively reconstructed and invented news from a jammed broadcast
• Algerians combined modern and traditional medicine for political and psychological reasons
• Algerians explained radio refusal through family honor and moral taboo
• Algerians read the retreat of colonialism from settler fear and anger
• Algerians refused hospitalization until death was nearly certain
• Algerians refused radios without any organized resistance or rational decision
• Algerians rejected colonial medicine not from ignorance but as resistance
• Algerians treated deliberate radio static as the presence of the Revolution
• Algerians’ stated radio objections were rationalizations of the occupier’s rejection
• Any social revolution in Algeria required breaking colonial ties first
• Armed revolutionary participation permanently transformed Algerian women’s self-identity and social role
• Armed struggle restored meaning to Algerian life and death
• Armed struggle restores meaning to Algerian lives that colonial domination emptied
• Bantu Philosophy challenged the colonial paternalism underpinning mission methods
• Before 1945 Europeans owned 95 percent of Algerian radios
• Before 1954 an Algerian radio marked Europeanization and vulnerability
• Bolivian miners gave days of monthly wages to buy union radio transmitters.
• Bolivian miners’ union radio transmitters counter official media blackouts and unite workers.
• Both the old paternalist and the coercive forms of colonial Algeria were dying.
• By late 1956 both France’s military and diplomatic options in Algeria had failed
• Camus refused to support fund-raising for families of Algerian political prisoners
• Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized
• Civil government progressively surrendered civilian functions to the army in Algeria.
• Claiming to hear the absent radio voice became a truth-bearing act of resistance.
• Collective acceptance of possible annihilation produced Cuban resolve
• Collective political murder suppresses traditional mourning in favor of silent gritting
• Colonial administrations routinely respond to insurgency with indiscriminate arrests that radicalize the innocent
• Colonial administrators used assimilated natives as agents to erode national culture
• Colonial and settler hysteria differ in that settlers translate fear into murderous acts
• Colonial attacks on a cultural practice determine where resistance crystallizes
• Colonial authorities embargoed medical supplies to deny Algerians self-treatment during the revolution
• Colonial authorities forced Europeans into a stark for-or-against choice at the outset
• Colonial authority depends on the colonized hearing no other voice
• Colonial authority fused doctor, administrator, and policeman into one identical figure.
• Colonial authority fused medicine with state power, making doctors indistinguishable from police
• Colonial collaboration trapped Algerian fathers in a web they could not escape
• Colonial collaborators hallucinated the rebel radio pronouncing death sentences
• Colonial conditions make life an incomplete, ever-menaced death
• Colonial confinement degraded Algerian women’s bodily mobility and assurance
• Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women
• Colonial contexts transform even rational medical help into perceived humiliation
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted
• Colonial doctors ended up treating Algerian patients like animals
• Colonial doctors interpreted Algerian pain as animal-like and undifferentiated
• Colonial doctors medically revived torture victims to enable further torture sessions
• Colonial doctors reduced colonized patients to animals to justify brutal care
• Colonial doctrine treated conquering women as the key to destroying Algerian resistance
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions
• Colonial domination is undone first in the colonized subject’s inner life
• Colonial domination itself, not tradition, shapes native resistance to medicine
• Colonial ethnographers claimed a hidden matriarchy lay beneath visible Algerian patriarchy
• Colonial fears about subject groups persisted without any actual rebellion
• Colonial fragmentation paradoxically forges the unity that drives revolution
• Colonial historiography inherited administrative map distinctions its practice violated
• Colonial hysteria manifested in murderous acts for settlers but suicide-like self-exposure for the colonized
• Colonial infrastructure and language bans functioned as claims to permanent occupation
• Colonial infrastructure and language prohibition were built to foreclose any future separation
• Colonial law compelled doctors to surveil wounded Algerians under legal penalty
• Colonial life resembles incomplete death, and rejecting treatment is passive surrender
• Colonial life was structurally split between settler existence and colonized agony
• Colonial medical practice functioned as systematized piracy that defrauded patients
• Colonial medical practice in Algeria degenerated into systematic fraudulent profit-taking.
• Colonial medical techniques were rejected until the revolution reappropriated them
• Colonial medicine doubled as an intelligence and torture apparatus
• Colonial medicine enters colonized societies paired with racial humiliation.
• Colonial medicine rationed by race, poisoning the colonized view of the European minority
• Colonial medicine’s ethical codes clashed with French authorities’ discriminatory policies
• Colonial method required capturing bodies before minds
• Colonial military dominance ceased to be decisive in Algeria’s war.
• Colonial occupation contests the entire country’s history and daily life
• Colonial occupation extends into the individual body and daily life itself
• Colonial power structures standardize doctor-patient relations, destroying personal contact
• Colonial powers impose a double moral standard demanding restraint only from the colonized
• Colonial press propaganda shaped even sympathetic settlers’ early views
• Colonial privilege let Europeans smuggle arms past checkpoints and mocked natives aloud
• Colonial property ownership aligns doctors with the oppression and exploitation of the colonized
• Colonial racism led some humiliated Jews to identify with their humiliators against Algerians
• Colonial radio services altered programming schedules to respect Algerian family hierarchy
• Colonial reprisals restored European Algerians’ race prejudice and arrogance.
• Colonial rule breaks the reciprocal relation between family and society
• Colonial rule rewarded mixed-bloods according to their degree of whiteness.
• Colonial rule’s native strata produced a renegade nationalist intelligentsia
• Colonial settlers’ deepest fear was expulsion, not political loss
• Colonial spatial control derives its strength from flexibility, not rigidity
• Colonial violence against families forged Algerian national unity through shared suffering
• Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial
• Colonial violence forced Algerian leaders to adopt women as combatants
• Colonial violence itself, not just revolutionary solidarity, reshaped Algerian feminine society
• Colonial war fragmented the Algerian family and individualized its members
• Colonial war generated a new Algerian humanity arising from the blood shed
• Colonialism can be internally duplicated within a colonized country
• Colonialism deliberately fostered division between Algerian Jews and Moslems
• Colonialism is held causally responsible for every single Algerian death
• Colonialism occupies the individual’s psyche, not merely the territory
• Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it
• Colonized Algerians rejected the radio without any organized resistance, contradicting Western sociological explanations
• Colonized and colonizer can never value the same thing together
• Colonized civilians relied on defiant inner conviction against traumatizing French press
• Colonized hospitalization refusal stems from anti-colonial resistance, not rural superstition.
• Colonized patients framed the medical encounter itself as a battle to win
• Colonized patients’ bodies resist clinical examination as rigidly as their words
• Colonized people reject the occupier’s values even when objectively worth choosing
• Colonized peoples accept technology once it serves their own revolution
• Colonized peoples must fight cleanly by double standards while colonizers freely use terror
• Colonized peoples must prove national worth through flawless conduct to be accepted
• Colonized peoples read colonial vaccination as a tool of subjugation
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation
• Colonized populations reject imperial medicine not from ignorance but as political resistance.
• Colonizer hysteria expressed itself as murder while colonized hysteria became self-destructive display
• Combat carried fraternal relations out of ritual deference into shared authority
• Combat in 1956 stripped both Arabic and French of their fixed colonial meanings
• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry
• Curing the colonial neurosis requires changing both individual and society
• Daughters’ revolutionary service dissolved fathers’ traditional demands for virginity
• Doctors kept torture victims alive so interrogation sessions could continue.
• During national war all news becomes good news because belief itself is revolutionary action
• Each Algerian generation grows harder rather than wearier against colonialism
• Educated colonial men still view white women as unattainable honor they must apologize for
• Embargoed medications took on revolutionary weapon-value for the colonized
• Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism
• European descendants erased and transferred colonial attachment after leaving Java
• European doctors funneled massive quantities of medicine to the A.L.N. resistance
• European doctors in Algeria saw unveiled women as disappointingly ordinary
• European doctors secretly trained A.L.N. medical corpsmen in Algeria
• European doctors smuggled antibiotics and ether to the Algerian resistance daily
• European doctors treated wounded A.L.N. fighters in their own clinics
• European doctors who befriended Algerians were warned by superiors and settler civilians.
• European medical professionals smuggled massive quantities of antibiotics to the maquis
• European militants under torture never betrayed vital information to French authorities
• European observers read the veil as concealing beauty that should be forcibly exhibited
• European participation in the rebellion collapsed the colonial legal distinction
• European settler farms served as A.L.N. granaries after French grain destruction
• European settlers actively aided the F.L.N. and died for the Algerian cause
• European settlers’ aggressive demands for minority rights dissolved when assured of belonging
• European women felt economically and socially threatened by assimilated Algerian women
• Even defeated uprisings persist through the hidden act of keeping arms
• Even extreme colonial repression does not justify every retaliatory act.
• Even incomprehensible broadcasts sustain Algerians’ revolutionary faith
• Even jamming static was reinterpreted as evidence of the resistance’s presence.
• Even native doctors are perceived by the colonized as part of the oppressors’ camp
• Fanon asserted that Jews were not categorically aligned with colonialism
• Fanon finds solidarity with Jews through shared racialized suffering
• Ferhat Abbas denied an Algerian nation existed before 1936
• Forced evacuation of mechtas restructured Algerian perceptual and social reality
• Forced public unveiling drove Algerian women back to the veil in solidarity
• Fragmentary colonial-blocked news was reconstructed collectively by Algerian listeners.
• France regrouped a million Algerians to sever the army from the people
• France targeted the veil deliberately in the 1930s after ethnological studies
• Free imperial vaccination programs are met with justified suspicion as tools of exploitation.
• French army doctors induced experimental epileptic fits in Algerians to measure racial seizure thresholds.
• French authorities compelled doctors to report wounded Algerians under legal penalty.
• French authorities weaponized the medical supply chain against the revolution
• French colonial broadcasting in Algeria dropped Arabic content, serving only French speakers
• French colonial rule counteracted Algerian radio access by banning radio sales.
• French colonialism built permanent structures assuming endless occupation
• French colonialism denied that Europeans could genuinely support Algerian independence
• French colonialism occupied the Algerian individual’s self, not merely the territory
• French jamming forced Algerians into a tactical war of the waves
• French jamming forced Algerians into active radio wave-countering tactics.
• French language and emotional ties lingered in post-independence Algeria
• French medical spaces were contested between resistance nurses and police informers
• French regroupment camps caused severe physiological deterioration among Algerians
• French republicans denied Algerians the very liberty they taught them
• Friendly voices arise as psychiatric self-defense against accusing voices
• Hallucinated protective voices parallel the colonized creating a national voice
• Hallucinating patients create protective counter-voices to defend against accusing ones
• Illiteracy and unemployment forced Algerian girls into early marriage
• In European dreams rape of an Algerian woman is preceded by tearing the veil.
• In European dreams, raping the Algerian woman requires first rending her veil
• Individual workers’ decisions to strike are backed by their whole families and populations
• Inner psychological mutation, not independence, is what generates national sovereignty
• Inner transformation precedes and drives national sovereignty
• Internment of men left Algerian women to sustain families alone
• Jewish tradesmen in close contact with Algerians supplied the A.L.N. militarily
• Jews inside colonial militias leaked patrol intelligence to the F.L.N.
• Joint political struggle restructured Algerian gender relations from within
• Kabyle women’s non-veiling became a colonial propaganda tool to divide Arabs and Berbers
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience
• Leftist Europeans supported distant decolonizations while denying Algeria’s own independence question
• Legal nationalist politics before 1954 did not disturb Algerian filial hierarchy
• Liberation struggle transformed the radio from submission tool into weapon
• Limited maroon refuge forced would-be escapees toward direct revolution
• Making the Revolution depend on women’s action was a wholly revolutionary step
• Martyred women militants replaced marriage as the model for Algerian female identity
• Mass resistance develops in unconscious depths before surfacing suddenly
• Medical embargoes meant some Algerians died for lack of treatment
• Militant women replaced marriageable women as aspirational models in Algeria
• Modern Algeria is inseparably the child of wartime Algeria
• Moroccan women adopted black veils as a combat symbol of mourning, not tradition
• Moroccan women adopted black veils as a deliberate symbolic combat measure
• National liberation opened up new roles for Algerian women
• National liberation transforms colonized people into rapid assimilators of modern technology.
• Nationwide mobilization pulled wives into the maquis where many learned of their husbands’ deaths
• Native non-adoption reinforced the impression of radio as a closed colonial world
• News deprivation drove Algerian men to hysterical, suicidal public demonstrations of imagined victory
• No genuinely independent left existed among Algeria’s European democrats before the revolution
• Occupation contests the whole country and its history, not territory alone
• Occupied people practice dissemblance in every contact with the occupier
• Only isolated revolutionary forces fail to represent the world revolution
• Owning a radio before 1954 meant surrendering the home to the colonizer
• Pacification devastated rural Algerian demographics, leaving eight women per two men
• Peoples habituated to colonial death do not fear atomic menace
• Peoples who endured colonial war are not intimidated by atomic menace.
• Post-1954 Europeans recognized an information network in native society that excluded them
• Pre-revolution activist politics left paternal authority within the family untouched
• Pre-war Algerian brothers deliberately avoided working together before the Revolution
• Pro-F.L.N. settlers publicly echoed colonialist talk to protect their cover, briefly becoming targets.
• Pro-revolution settlers had to disguise their allegiance even from the resistance
• Psychiatrists weaponized electric shock treatment as an interrogation technique.
• Racist colonial hierarchy led some Jews to humiliate Algerians to gain standing.
• Radio confirmed settlers’ sense of rightful continuity with the conquest
• Radios let settlers resist cultural absorption by the native environment
• Rastafarians remade themselves by appropriating and transforming borrowed cultural materials
• Regrouped Algerians deteriorated physiologically to the point that medication stopped working.
• Regroupement bred resistance even as it hampered the A.L.N. militarily.
• Regroupment camps produced physiological deterioration severe enough to defeat medication
• Reluctance to adopt new medical techniques occurs in European doctors too.
• Removing the veil disrupts the Algerian woman’s body image and spatial sense.
• Resistance itself transforms the colonized subject so that colonial rule becomes unmaintainable
• Resisting oppression transforms the colonized person so completely that colonialism becomes unsustainable
• Revolution dissolved the Algerian husband’s traditional jealousy of his wife
• Revolution fundamentally pursues human dignity rather than mere material survival
• Revolution reconstituted the conjugal couple as the cell of the nation
• Revolution strips away the mental handicaps produced by 130 years of colonial oppression
• Revolution transformed radio from tool of domination into nation-builder
• Revolution transformed the Algerian couple from a family contract into a revolutionary unit
• Revolution transformed the occupier’s lie into evidence of national truth
• Revolutionary authority in Algeria replaced the elder brother’s automatic precedence
• Revolutionary authority replaced arbitrary husband repudiation with reconciliatory divorce procedure
• Revolutionary health programs succeeded where colonial medical campaigns had failed
• Revolutionary leaders knew arrested women would be tortured to death
• Revolutionary medicine rejected the paternalist methods of colonial health programs
• Revolutionary peoples assimilate modern technology at extraordinary speed
• Revolutionary struggle fused national liberation with women’s liberation in Algeria
• Routine war trauma sundered the Algerian family’s internal bonds
• Sanitary improvements are read by the colonized as colonial expansion.
• Settlers feared that without wine and radio they would become Arabized
• Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation.
• Socialism requires a transforming revolution because human experience is material.
• Socialism requires the material transformation of human beings, not merely of production
• Street violence in Algiers could force any French government to yield
• Technical instruments carry negative valence rooted in the colonial situation
• Technology acceptance depends on whose interests it serves, not the technology itself.
• Technology becomes accepted only when it serves revolutionary interests
• The 1954 revolution released a long-prepared tactic rather than awakening a passive people
• The Algerian Revolution transformed veil practices without ever planning to.
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically.
• The colonized accepts colonial medicine but must simultaneously honor traditional healing
• The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize
• The colonized learned of the revolution’s gravity by reading the settler’s visible anxiety
• The colonized perceive life as permanent struggle against omnipresent death
• The colonized relation to radio underwent dialectical mutation, not ambivalence
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance
• The colonized withhold truth from the colonizer as a defense.
• The colonizer is himself a victim of the colonial system he organizes
• The colonizer is simultaneously the organizer and victim of the colonial system.
• The European’s impulse to unveil Algerian women is an act of possession
• The F.L.N. recruited Jewish militia recruits as spies inside the colonial apparatus
• The female body’s shaping inverted from seduction into tactical concealment
• The FLN deliberately refused to showcase European participants to avoid colonial-style tokenism
• The French Left’s inaction eliminated any liberal alternative for Algeria’s Europeans
• The girl’s militant commitment converted even the patriarchal father to revolution
• The liberation radio’s effect was a dialectical mutation, not mere ambivalence
• The maquis instituted voluntary registered marriage replacing family-arranged unions
• The national struggle transformed the radio from hostile object into protective one
• The occupier’s effort to confiscate radios and jam broadcasts ultimately failed
• The oppressed group’s apparent weakness becomes a revolutionary advantage against the enemy
• The rebel radio induced auditory hallucinations in colonists and collaborators
• The revolution affected Algerian women’s lives more profoundly than any other domain
• The Revolution dissolved patriarchal jealousy between Algerian men and women
• The revolution ended unilateral repudiation and instituted arbitration for Algerian divorce
• The Revolution let love override customary paternal marriage authority in Algeria
• The revolution redefined manly virility as patriotic combat for Algerian women
• The revolution relocated masculine virility from home to patriotic combat
• The revolution transforms the family’s apparent weakness into strategic advantage
• The revolutionary struggle itself loosened the veil’s taboo, then reversed it
• The settler’s radio functioned as psychological armor against the surrounding native environment
• The Soummam Congress in French ended Algerian reticence about the colonizer’s language
• The SYL nationalized politics by reversing Italian colonial clan-based social engineering
• The unveiled Algerian woman functioned as an essential operative in the revolutionary network.
• The veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument
• The veil’s meaning reversed from resistance symbol to revolutionary instrument
• The veiled woman’s unreciprocated gaze frustrates and aggresses the colonizer
• Three-quarters of Algerian Jews were Arabized natives who considered themselves Algerians
• Total faith in good news expresses determination to be in on the Revolution
• Turning to armed struggle dissolves filial deference and creates individual autonomy
• Uncomprehended Arabic broadcasts still sustained Algerian hope through the word Istiqlal
• Uncomprehended broadcasts still sustained Algerian peasants’ will to fight
• Unconscious anti-Arab bias kept a European open only to a fellow non-Arab’s call
• Understanding colonial damage requires walking the wounded earth step by step
• Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized.
• Unveiled Algerian women unsettled European women by excelling at Western femininity
• Using French against them forced the occupiers to see their own signs as relative
• Violence from above can only be ended by violence from below
• War dislocates society so all deaths are attributed to colonialism
• Winning over women gave colonial power over men and destructured culture
• Witnessing colonial torture firsthand converted a French doctor to the Algerian cause.
• Witnessing torture pushed a European medical family to collaborate with the F.L.N.
• Women entered the resistance by invoking operational effectiveness against masculine secrecy
• Women’s liberation depends on liberating all oppressed strata simultaneously