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Red Africa:Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics
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Excavating the history of Marxism and Black revolutionary politics
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'.
The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised – instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.
Reviews
Provocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures.
A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome.
This is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination.
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In this rigorous debut, political theorist Okoth revisits the philosophies of mid-20th-century African revolutionaries....Activists and readers interested in leftist political history will be enthralled.
Publishers Weekly -
Kevin Ochieng Okoth's Red Africa is a timely and stimulating intervention that takes aim at the heart of some of the prominent modes of "anti-politics" in contemporary Black and decolonial thought. With provocative insight and perceptive judgement, Okoth rereads past moments and movements and discourses-from Bandung to Negritude to Pan-Africanism-in order to remind us of the transnational political critique to which they were variously committed. The project, needless to say, is not to urge a naïve nostalgic return to earlier strategies of Black and antiimperialist thinking. The project, rather, is to grasp the character of the current conjuncture, and to offer, partly from the remnants of the past in the present, a redescription of the legacies of national liberation, Marxism, and radical Black internationalism, an intellectual tradition Okoth calls "Red Africa," so as to be able to simultaneously reclaim and rethink, recover and renew, the prospect of revolutionary Black futurities.
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Okoth recounts key events in numerous parts of Africa, particularly but not exclusively, those countries which experienced revolutions led by Marxist parties and organizations…it is remarkable how much historical data Okoth condenses in a short book.
, Socialism and Democracy -
Brief, but punchy.
, Monthly Review