I moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.
pan African ideology
We are an African People
Book ReviewsCommentJoining and in some ways exceeding a recent list of Black Power-era scholarship, Russell Rickford’s We Are an African People is the first up-to-date chronicle and intellectual history of what the author calls “Pan African nationalist schools.” National in scope and well attuned to local and international contexts, We Are an African People pays particular attention to organizations and institutional builders-cum-activists of the late 1960s and 1970s, offering “a sympathetic yet critical analysis of Pan African nationalism’s ideological groundings… [and] a host of theoretical and practical weaknesses [that] plagued the quest for independent black institutions” (p. 18). Rickford combines intellectual rigor with dense archival research, packaged in higher level argumentation, yet the prose is accessible. The result or aim is not simply an examination of “Black Power through the lens of independent schools,” but rather the fertile political ideas generated by their discourses and as “a valuable means of accessing contemporary efforts to model a postrevolutionary future,” set against Rickford’s own political and intellectual biography. As Rickford explains, “I had aspired to open an Afrocentric academy as a symbol of my commitment to black nationalist development…[as a member] of the African-American middle class…. Probing the genealogy of my own bourgeois nationalist origins led to an analysis of the late Black Power ideologies in the age of neoliberalism. We Are an African People is the product of that inquiry” (pp. ix-x). Though Rickford’s political coming-of-age may necessarily be the coming-of-age of Black Power scholarship, the book under review offers much to digest and consider beyond the intellectual biographies of either the author or his topic.