Promised Land: The Rise and Fall of the Global Pan-African Movement

FAIN: FT-286407-22

Adam Ewing
Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA 23284-9005)

Research supporting three chapters of a book tracing the rise and decline of revolutionary Pan Africanist action in the 20th century.

Promised Land tells the story of the rise and decline of revolutionary pan-Africanism in the 20th century. By tracing the emergence and the spread of pan-Africanism as a popular politics, it challenges accounts that have conceived the tradition as a top-down intellectual project. Promised Land explores the ways in which Black communities across the US, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe drew on cultural resources, on new ideas about racial identity, and on new solidarities to carve out spaces that defied the universalizing ambitions of European colonial power. Following WWI, Black activists catalyzed this energy in an effort to make the world anew, mobilizing a politics that sought to smash European hegemony, reestablish Black sovereignty, and usher in a new world committed to the principles of anti-racism, self-determination, and equality. Climaxing in the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, this revolutionary thrust forms one of the central dramas of the modern era.