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Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Dr. Zachary Williams, and I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Leslie James, who is professor in the Global History Department at Queens University of London. And it's an honor to be able to speak with her today about her book, the Moving how the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought from the years of 1935 to 1960. I want to welcome you, Dr. James, to the New Books Network.
- [00:42]
B
Thank you very much for having me.
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A
Oh, thank you for the opportunity to be able to speak with you about your work and about your research. And if you could please just introduce yourself and introduce some of the ideas and thoughts and even experiences that led you to write your book as a sort of way of beginning our conversation together.
- [01:03]
B
Okay, thank you. So this book did come out of my first book, which was about the Pan Africanist organizer George Padmore. And it was when I was finishing the research and the work for that that I had really unearthed a lot of unexpected numbers of publications from him in newspapers. And I had started reading these newspapers in the British Library in London, in Trinidad, in Jamaica, in Ghana, in Nigeria. And it just. Several people sort of prompted and said, you know, there's so much here that really hasn't had enough attention. And I agreed. And so I kept going. And the initial project was actually, I had initially thought of it as a way of using newspapers to test the breadth and depth of the concepts of black internationalism. So this is more than 10 years ago that I really started. This is more like. I'm thinking, like 13, 14 years ago, when black internationalist scholarship had really burgeoned. And that's the way that I initially thought of the project. And then, of course, when you get into the project, it changes many times over in how I was thinking about it. But that was the initial idea coming out of black internationalist work and sort of thinking, well, why not use these newspapers, which many are clearly recognizing played an important role in this burgeoning period of the 1930s. But I wanted to expand the scope of that and deepen it as well.
- [02:59]
A
I think it's fascinating your sort of approach and what brought you to this incredible work and is an incredible work of scholarship and want to applaud you on its scope, its breadth and its depth, and in the largest sort of broader dimensions of it, as you were talking about the ways in which, as with your research and even your position, how you and your work goes beyond sort of, you know, studying, researching Western civilization to Explore sort of the broader sort of reaches of the interrelationships in global history. And now we have these conversations about, you know, sort of return to Western civilization, but how that sort of relates to, you know, you know, the ways in which, you know, networks and particularly these, these newspaper networks are operating on a global level and showing how this colonial, anti colonial world is shaping a sort of a new world order. Global order that now of course positions itself as the Global south and Global North. Could you also speak about the broader scope of the work and how it does sort of help to show how players and actors and even institutions or counter institutions are rearranging this sort of conversation about what is local, what is global, what is Western, and what is, you know, alternatives to Western, to kind of piece this puzzle together about this global 20th century.
- [04:26]
B
Yeah. Thank you. So I mean, this is. This part of what I'm going to say to respond is in the book, but it's also I'm impacted by. I teach a module, I teach a MA of history of political thought module on the black radical trad. And I just came out of teaching that yesterday. And I mean, I think what a lot of the scholarship, I'm thinking here of Professor Anthony Bogues and Robin Kelly and Cedric Robinson and then even David Scott, you know, all of that recognize, put, put one of the core things is to say that this is, this is internal to the discussion. It's not, it's adjacent to and it's often separated out, but it, but it's, it's not an external part of Western political thought. It's, it's internal to it and it's an internal critique to it. And then once you recognize that, then what more does that bring to shaping understandings of democracy, for example? So in terms of rearranging, you know, what is the history of Western civilization, I have a chapter on conceptions of time. And in that part of it, there's a lot to that chapter and a lot to what black thinkers were doing around conceptions of time. But one of it was to rearrange the history of modern Western civilization and imperialism that places the African continent and African enslaved peoples at the center of that story. So that's one of the way that the newspaper contributors were doing that as well. Maybe I'll pause there because you also asked a question about the local and the global.
- [06:41]
A
But yeah, yeah, that's a good beginning and actually helps to lead into my next question where in the introduction you talk about the press is a political actor. And when you talk about what Institutions like as the fourth Estate, the press, how it influences political activity even from the margins, right? This conversation between the margins and the center, and how West African Caribbean newspapers are part of this public sphere of anti colonial debate and black political imagination. And how does that sort of, you know, promote this idea of the cultural politics in the colonial world? And how does the cultural politics help to influence these public policy conversations that will eventually take place, you know, before independence and even after.
- [07:24]
B
Okay, excellent. So one of the main pillars of the argument of the book is, is that newspapers are often mined for the content, for what they might be saying about politics or about governance or about decolonization or about fascism, all of the things that are underway at the time. But what I emphasize is that in colonies in particular, but, but in, I mean the public sphere, the newspapers are fundamental to conceptions of the public sphere, conceptions of nationalism, thanks to Benedict Anderson, right. And others. And, and they are fundamental. They are the fourth estate. They're essential to the understanding of modern democracy and how it functions. And the press, contributors of African owned newspapers in, in, in the 20th century and Caribbean newspapers in the 20th cent understood this. And the phrase, this comes out of the work of Stephanie Newell. First of all, I should say is that this phrase that emerges in the West African press, the fourth and only estate, and this is really, I think, and I emphasize in the book, an anti colonial argument, because what it first and foremost draws attention to is that in colonized societies there is no other mechanism for public discussion. There is no other aspect of democracy except for a functioning newspaper culture. And so this is the voice of the people. This is the only voice for people in colonized societies. And the newspapers really make a lot of that. And they use it as, I think in the 1930s and the 40s, an anti colonial critique of how colonialism operates to remove democracy in its colonies. So because of that, the cultural world that, that exists in the colonies is politicized immediately, right. Already. And it has to do with the marginalized in colonies speaking to the center and the metropole and how the whole public sphere operates. And we can come into this later, but that actually once I recognized that, because it hits you, the newspapers are not shy about it. I mean, once you read them, you'll see it everywhere. But once I realized that, that helped me to understand then how newspapers functioned in the process of decolonization. And we can come to that later. But one of the reasons, what I didn't say at the start was one of the reasons for the book was that there's this recognition that there's an efflorescence of political debate and activity in the 1930s and 40s, and that newspapers are crucial to this, but then it just kind of dies away. And there's no explanation for what happens to the newspapers at precisely the moment when they are negotiating. In the cases that I'm looking at negotiating self government, why is it that newspapers start to take a backseat? And understanding that argument of the fourth and only estate and of the importance of newspapers as part of the political infrastructure, then helped me to figure out why it was that maybe they might have actually shifted and changed in the 50s and 60s at the moment of decolonization.
- [11:23]
A
That's interesting, you know, when you think about sort of their sort of evolution, sort of the sort of independence era sort of critique, but then become sort of, you know, subsumed within sort of state formation after that and sort of this whole move to professional, you know, sort of sort of professional presentation. But also how they're also, you know, as you're saying, the print worlds are sort of like akin to sort of intellectual networks, but they're also reflective of unruly movements. And when you talk about that, it kind of speaks to, you know, you know, the work of like Imani Owens when he talks about turning the world upside down, the empire and the unruly forms of black folk culture in the US and the Caribbean in a comparative way into where the sort of the creators of the newspapers and newspaper editors, their relationship to institutions and people, folk cultures sort of weave in these sorts of different ways of imagining and being. But also how, in her words, it's sort of a self invention that goes beyond the local to the global. But how the institutions, the newspapers as the fourth estate, are sort of networks that sort of piece together sort of this critique in this conversation within borders, within spaces, that also goes beyond spaces. So, so how do we talk about, how do you talk about this whole idea of, you know, what's, what's formal and informal and professional and, and seen as uncouth and how that is sort of like with power dynamics and hegemony interwoven within systems as opposed to just separate spheres?
- [12:54]
B
Yeah, so the, again, so again, so the, the formal and the informal and the, the pieces and the fragments were essential to how these newspapers operated, to what their infrastructure was in the 1930s and 40s. But because what we're talking about in most cases is newspapers that do not court the favor of the colonial administration, whether they're African owned newspapers or whether the Newspapers that are emerging in the Caribbean around labor movements and workers and unions or Garveyism or Ethiopianism or peasant culture, all of these papers or these emergent political forums that have newspapers, they don't have access to wireless news services. They don't have access to money from advertising because the colonial administration don't give their advertising to these newspapers. So they function on a very unruly black, Atlantic, deeply historical process of clipping and reprinting. And Isabel and Derek Peterson, Isabel Hoffmeier and Derek Peterson have done this work to say the circulation and exchange system was well established. It's written into the Berne Convention that you can clip and reprint without necessarily attribution. And what that means in the context of the black press, the global black press, is that they have cultivated in one way, a deeply personal and also highly socialized way of getting content from each other. And so in the newspapers, what you have are poems and stories and old speeches or new speeches from radio into print, and from print back to radio is happening. And all of that clipping is done in a way, again, that circumvent the networks that the Metropole, in this case Britain, would like them to be getting their news from. So, again, this practice is how they are getting their content. But it's a also. It's also a political, I think a political. Partly political. It's a political network that does this in part, and in that way, they are defying the dynamic of the Metropole and what the Metropole wants. At the same time, they're pushed into it because they are marginalized and excluded. And so that. That question about the power dynamic is important. And just as they're pushed into it, they're also further excluded. So, you know, when I'm reading the Colonial Office files from London over and over again, you will see colonial administrators sort of deriding the character of the press, because that isn't really. I talk about this idea that they're like, not really newspapers because they don't look and sound the way the newspapers look in Britain in many respects. And so these are kind of not to be taken seriously. They're not really newspapers. They're this other kind of poor man's effort at the real show. And so that attitude comes. Comes in to the power dynamic of how the press are excluded in the 1930s and 40s from the colonial notion of how newspapers should function. And this then leads to. This, in part, leads to the moves to professionalize in the 1940s and 1950s.
- [17:13]
A
That's interesting. It's sort of interplay of different narratives and the different sort of venues or different genres or different sort of ways in which it's shared or presented. And if you could speak more to like, you know, examples of how does that sort of cultivate or shift public opinion within particular spaces and places and how does it contribute to this move for independence and this sort of growing crescendo of peoples and to harness, you know, harness their sort of interests both in sort of, you know, culturally political ways, like everyday sort of conversation, satire or sort of, you know, happenings within spaces to what can be considered to be sort of, you know, overtly political. You kind of compare to what the black press is doing in the US but also this. This transnational, you know, Atlantic, Global Atlantic, where you have these conversations taking place within the black press in the US and also what's taking place, you know, and it happens about what's taking place in. In Africa, West Africa and the Caribbean, and this sort of. This global conversation for independence in different spaces and places. And I mean, how does that sort of, you know, materialize over time and does it contribute to this, you know, this sort of move for independence or how much does it contribute to building sort of momentum for independence?
- [18:34]
B
So it. I mean, I like the way you put that. It is a movement. It is over time. And I think that's. That's a good way of thinking about why I have come to see the press as so important. And actually it's why I took it on in the first place, because of this format, which is like either daily or weekly over time, people taking it out and binding these things into their homes and rereading them and reprinting. So reprinting is a crucial aspect of what people are doing to build that global conversation. Reprint from somewhere else into your own context, and then that thing takes on its new meaning in that place. So one of the key things that I paid attention to quite a lot was how often they're reprinting, where they're reprinting from, and when and why. And what does that do once it goes into that alternate space? In the 1930s, what was very clear is that they're tracking each other's events and movements. And you will see a poem from Trinidad that goes and is reprinted in Barbados and then goes to and is reprinted in Ghana. And that poem next to a news item in Ghana about dock workers takes on an entirely different meaning. But it's a way what you can see in the letters that are coming and the editorials you'll get, the comments coming in. And you'll see that as people are reading across the page over time, they are using those items to make connections between what's happening with the labor revolts in the Caribbean and what's happening with the cocoa crisis in Nigeria and Ghana in the 1930s, or what's happening in the United States and the argument and debates about, for example, settler colonialism and the emergence of apartheid in Africa. So the fact that it's happening over time, the fact that people are very much cultivating that sense of a long duray in which they're not afraid to reprint stuff that's a little bit older in a newspaper and then to put that global content against their local events. And it's very clear part of the book. So one of. Part of the work that I then had to do was say, okay, well, what are the reading and listening practices and how do those operate to enable people to make these connections? And it's very clear that the black press has cultivated readerships that know how to read between the lines in context of censorship in colonies. They know how to read across the page and across decades. And to make those connections. It's part of what they do and how they operate. And so the cultural practices around listening and reading that draws in oral and textual and. Well, Karen Barber says, you know, I take it from her that I think of texts as both oral and written, and both of those practices are coming into the paper in new ways. I can come back. I think I could say more about your earlier question about the genres and the types of things that are happening. Because the other important aspect is, for example, the way that in the Caribbean creole language is part of the newspapers in Nigeria and in Ghana, but particularly in Nigeria, there's a set of journalists who, you can see, really cultivate their own genres that are conversant with the way that people are speaking in those contexts, but also really pull into, you know, Afro, futurist, surrealist, modernist kind of practices that you see. And there's lots of great scholarship on this, of how these are both local, but also knitted into genres of playing with time, playing with satire in different ways. Shape shifting. In Nigeria, there's a set of journalists who shapeshift to narrate the news. So he. This. Well, he or she will. But very likely he will transform into winged creatures to drop in the pockets of colonial administrators and tell his readers what. What the policemen are doing. And this bears striking resemblance to a character that later appears in, I think, in Drum Manx magazine. But it's the Langston Hughes character. But as far as I can tell and other people who've worked on this, I think this Nigerian author and the genre that they cultivate is first. And so it's very possible Langston Hughes was first was reading and in a very popular west in West African Pilot, a very popular Nigerian newspaper. So it's very possible Langston Hughes got it from that Nigerian paper.
- [24:56]
A
It's interesting because it mirrors what's happening in the United States with the letters and the writings and the playful language in newspapers like the Baltimore Afro American, the Chicago Defender and the, the other newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier, which are actually being, you know, the shape shifting and teleporting and transporting of them along sort of rail, rail lines and railway by sleeping car porters who are perceived to be sort of one way were also operating sort of in these, sort of these with interiority and agency, you know, to sort of transport and take those papers to places throughout the country and to have people to be aware of what's happening in, you know, in different places and spaces. Along with letter writing, which also are featured along the society pages and satire and columns and letters, but also where they're having these global networks, right. And then people actually are traveling back and forth, you know, as students, you know, like Kwame Nkrumah and others being educated in London in the US Elaine Locke and others are, and other scholars are in different places and spaces and interacting, interfacing. And so it's sort of a broad level of agency that's, that's happening. And when you're talking about the examples and the idea of shape shifting as it also relates to even, you know, modern African fiction and even sort of goes back to some earlier forms and this continuity, it's fascinating to see how this sort of the cultural politics is, is. Is on display and, and it brings to the question about your, your chapter on Plotting Freedom. You know, I think that's, that's fascinating, you know, from sort of a satire, even sort of a sort of, you know, a creative standpoint, you know. You know, what is to plot Freedom in the sort of context of, you know, colonial, anti colonial independence, post independence West African Caribbean newspapers and the fusion of that, right. The West African and the Caribbean, not just separate silos of spheres, but as integrated, creating this integrated consciousness. Could you speak to some of that?
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B
Yeah. Excellent. So the chapter Plotting Freedom is. So the book is. Is in two parts, in two halves. And I always thought, I think of Plotting Freedom as the, that's the linchpin to the whole book. Really, it's the first half builds up to it. And once that is what it establishes, then helps us make sense of what happens in the second book, in the second part, as we move into the 40s and 50s. And so what we've had, what I set up is all of these genres and the kind of means by which people are reshaping time, playing with time and space and playing with language and doing all of these things to convey what they want and clipping and reprinting. And then in plotting freedom, what we come to is how all of those techniques are really cultivating a careful shared collective debate about the meaning of freedom and what it might entail and who is involved in that. And what I came to realize as I was as reading these papers and as I was seeing what they were doing is that all the canonical works of the 1930s that established the conception of racial capitalism as we now know it. So Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, clr James Black Jacobins, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, George Padmore's Africa, Britain's Third Empire. These books are really expressing what is underway by so many people on the ground. The conception of racial capitalism is being innovated as well as articulated by the people in these newspapers. And they do it through these techniques. So what you'll see is clipping and reprinting from Trinidad to Ghana that enables a Ghanaian editor to make the close connection between kind of. I'm trying to think about the exact way that they do it. They make the connection between finance capital in Trinidad that is closely tied to the colonial administration, that is white planter owned furtherance of the sugar industry. And then to take that and read it in Ghana in the context of what's happening with the cocoa crisis and to make the connection between racial supremacy, finance capital and extraction of resources, both human and material. And that happens because of what you've said, this kind of integrated, cross contaminated cultural politics where they can take what's happening and they know they're reading across. They're very well versed. There's an editor in Nigeria, J.V. clinton, who in many respects is politically, many people would put him in the politically conservative category. And yet he is making really sharp critiques about settler colonialism and domination and racialized labor and the rise of fascism and resource extraction. And he's doing it because he's really, he's. He seems to know what's going on in the Tridden ad newspapers and the Jamaican newspapers and the American news and the black American press. And he pieces it all together.
- [31:14]
C
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B
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- [31:45]
A
That'S interesting. I mean, because a lot of the newspapers, the West African, the Caribbean, those networks, and even the black press in the US they feature sort of a, sort of, you know, a broad spectrum of perspectives to show the sort of, you know, sort of broad array of thought, colorful thought happening within these spaces and places and the communities from which they come. And it's fascinating because oftentimes we begin to think that people are sort of monolithic in their thought. There's a lot of vibrancy to conversations and debates and discussions about the meaning of independence, the meaning of, you know, of whatever sort of, you know, the idea of freedom, which I think it's interesting and along with, you know, your, your thought about and the conception of, of plotting freedom and as you're also talking about the, the organizing of the moving word, and I think it's a fascinating title and how it moves along these circuits and nodes and, and, but also has the ways in which those ideas are able to, to shape, you know, these broader sort of, you know, trends of, of, of analysis and the like. And in your second part, you begin to talk about how the process of decolonization shifts and changes some of the different sort of positioning. Can you speak to the post decolonization or the decolonization of the post independence era, moving word? And how does it sort of shape shift and does it retain some of its vibrancy in that time and space?
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B
Thank you. So, yeah, the first part of what you said really draws out another important part of how I came to think of black political thought in terms of recognizing that that vibrancy ranges ideologically and includes many people who have very different ideas and yet are in conversation. So you have in the Caribbean newspapers that are like Garveyite but also Ethiopianist, which, you know, those are related. But then also surprisingly, you have people who have clearly had communist influences, Marxist influences, and it's not. These aren't. I came to appreciate how even when you have newspapers that really, ascribe to kind of one ideological position. People might be reading more than one and they're, they're thinking across a lot of things. And that's partly where that heterogeneous terrain, ideological terrain of thought is happening. And then the question is how. What happens to that in the era of decolonization? I do think it dwindles. That's part of the argument of the book. That doesn't mean it goes away, it just means it moves out of the newspapers because the newspapers become circumscribed into the process of decolonization. So one of the main arguments for the book is that because of the claim of the Fourth and On the Estate that. And in each of these contexts where they are negotiating constitutional self government, that's the process through which they go through decolonization. The press becomes a key kind of pillar that they can point to to say, look, we've got a we, we're, we're ready even as they're. And I fully agree with Adam Getachu and others that what anti colonialists were doing in the 1940s and 50s was rejecting the idea that they should somehow be ready for independence. At the same time, the readiness paradigm is part of how they had to operate even as they're rejecting it. And what you see in the press is that it becomes, it becomes part of the marker for decolonization. And in that context, the content shifts, the places that they're getting, content shifts to a certain extent. The vibrancy is still there, but it's changed. The newspapers have changed quite, quite a lot. And this is also part of globalizing shifts. So as part of decolonization, it's also part of a global awareness of the importance of newspapers to political debate and political culture that starts to create, you know, through the UN and UNESCO, you get. And a push towards professionalizing journalistic standards, for example, and expanding wireless services like Reuters and others. I mean, the Associated Negro Press plays a role, but not really in, not so much in the colonies until independence in 1960. So what happens is, if I can, if I can go to that, what I emphasize, what I trace in the second half of the book is the move to professionalize the newspapers. And in professionalizing newspapers, this shifts the circuits where they're getting news from because they're starting to get wire that get official wireless services. In some instances. They're also cultivating press associations of their own and journalistic standards and codes of conduct. And all of that means that what is really kind of anarchic and kind of jumbled, that jumbled content and that space for unruly creativity in the 1930s and 1940s looks different, looks different in the newspapers in the 1940s and 50s, you still get innovations, you still get people starting to use photographs and cartoons and to bring the radio more into the newspapers and vice versa. So they are still in some cases exciting places, but they are predominantly pulled into the process of decolonization. So that either you professionalize or you are forced to close because you cannot compete in the market. So there's two forces really, that mean that by the moment of political independence, the number of sheer number of newspapers and what they're doing and the variety has dwindled because either they can't compete and they're forced to close, or they are tied to a political party that loses at the ballot box. So in a number of cases, what you see is these very well known, like the Trinidads, the People, for example, most of the Ghanaian newspapers of the 1930s, African owned newspapers of the 1940s are tied to political parties. And when they lose at the ballot box, in some cases, like within a month, they just aren't printing anymore. So those are the two things that really change the whole terrain for how newspapers function through the process of decolonization.
- [39:41]
A
That's interesting. And I do want to return to, before we conclude, return to the question of the sort of the evolution of sort of the character and nature of the press and the different ways it shapes, shifts, of course, from print into sort of digital social media. And even this ways in which podcast, for instance, now does this sort of circuitous return back to sort of radio of some sort and sort of the conversational sort of tone. But I do want to speak to the sort of conception of democracy and the ways in which the newspapers and your presentation, your research and your work speaks to the ways in which democracy is conceptualized and conversant, you know, between and among different spaces and places, between the Caribbean, West Africa and the broader Atlantic, and even global conversations and kind of relates with, you know, the work I've read, you know, years ago of Nick Brumel and the Time is always now and the link between American democracy and sort of the centerpiece, the central, sort of the central focusing of black thought and black political thought as the centerpiece of American democracy, of notions of democracy and around the world, globally speaking, and how even from the margins and even these spaces and places, through everyday language and satire and culture within spaces, how democracy is constructed and conversations about democracy are or conceptualized and Constructed. And how much do these newspapers help to reinvent or reimagine and rethink what democracy is and can be in the period between colonial rule and independence and post independence? And where does that stand today in terms of the moving word? Where is it moving to as it is seen institutionally?
- [41:43]
B
Okay, great big questions. How democracy. I mean, in these are colonial contexts, but they're, of course, knitting into the marginalization of black peoples globally. Right. And so maybe that's the first place to start is to appreciate how I think black political thought. Once you see it in the United States, in West Africa, in South Africa, in Europe, in the Caribbean, as being all in conversation, then you can start to appreciate how. How they are conceptualizing democratic processes together through global processes of disenfranchisement. So one of the things I wanted to. It struck me, I realized that we haven't talked about is the role of Ethiopia in all of this and in conceptualizing the world order. And Ethiopia is. So Ethiopia 1945 is so fundamental to the battle against fascism, global fascism. This is. Judith Byfield and others now say this is the beginning of World War II. It's the beginning of the battle for democracy, and it's the beginning of the battle against fascism. And it is the beginning of a global black critique of how democracy functions in the international order and in the Western world. And Du Bois thinking is all part of this. So I think that black political thought as a centerpiece of a global understanding of how democracy functions is, for me anyway, one of the best things that it offers to wider understandings of democracy and to reimagining democracy as simultaneously something that is happening locally, that requires local organizing as well as, at the same time, a global conversation. You are not free until we are free. That it all is connected, I think is kind of crucial to understanding what we imagine participation to be. And what's also being imagined is how we participate and what we want participation to be. In the newspapers in the 1950s and with all of these different practices, what you do start to get is a more representative set of voices. You see women in print in ways that were not there in earlier decades. I think I said, oh, it almost certainly was a he. Women start to come in because of technological innovations that then mean that we can expand who is participating and how they participate. And I think that's an important aspect of how things are changing in the newspapers of the time.
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A
That's incredible. We could continue to talk for a long time because it's such rich work and research and the networks and the links are incredible and they have sort of enduring, you know, as you're saying, the longer sort of influence into our time and even conceptually into what, what, you know, may, may be on the horizon even in the, you know, in the moment that we're living in, you know, globally regard to all the sort of shifts and changes, you know, can you speak also about what you're working on next, how it. And does it relate or correspond to the moving word or does it go beyond that or in a whole nother different direction?
- [46:05]
B
It I, I think I probably will never get now that I'm in it. I just love working with newspapers. So they'll probably continue to be a source and it does emerge out of, of a lot of what came out for me in the press. But what I'm working on now is global black anti apartheid and anti fascism and how those relate and a kind of into thinking through. What I'm hoping to think through is the intellectual genealogy of black anti fascism in the 1930s, how it moves into anti apartheid and how those things are connected. I think, you know, there's been lots of really good work, but what I wanted, what I've seen in the newspapers is really a through line that, you know, we think of anti fascism in the 1930s and 40s, and then we think about it with black power, for example, in all the various parts of the black world as it emerges. But, but there's this whole middle bit which actually by through reading the newspapers I started to see, you know, actually I think you can trace a line. I don't think necessarily intellectually. If we trace the ideas, I'd like to see how these move and shift and then reemerge later in other contexts. Because my suspicion is that there is a long anti apartheid movement that in many respects is emerging out of the anti fascism of the 1930s and 40s. So that's what I'm trying to start to think about now.
- [48:03]
A
That is great. I'm looking forward to being able to read about that. I know our readers are and listeners are as well to your work that is to come, as well as your current work and sort of getting into sort of greater depths in reading and understanding it. And so one final question. How do you think your work resonates with the world, the political world in which we live in today, the cultural political world? And how do you think it sort of is conversant with the times in which we live?
- [48:38]
B
So I think I kind of alluded to it at the end there, but One is, I mean, in terms of the creative ways that people figured out how to have these conversations is. Has a long history, right. That there's a lot of innovation in. In how people speak and. And I hope people can. I don't think this is my. My work is unique to this, but I hope what I add, it adds to this whole toolkit of how people are using creative genres to figure out how to speak and also how to think across with each other. What you sense in the 1930s is. And there's a lot of parallels being made between the 19 and they're real. It's hard for me to look at what's happening now and to have spent so much time in the 1930s and not to have, you know, seen this coming for many years now. But part of that, that I hope the book also demonstrates is that these feel like very binary political times. This feels like a political culture of. Of. Of hard lines and binaries. And what struck me about what I got from the newspapers is that while that's true, you know, we talked about the heterogeneous aspect of that political thought, that people were still conversing. They were figuring out ways to have to really debate the meaning of freedom, the meaning of sovereignty, the function of everything that's happening. And so that resonates. I hope that that resonates for me, and I hope that that resonates for other people as well.
- [50:44]
A
I'm sure that it will. It's sort of intriguing work and it's interesting and has a lot of relevance in helping us to think deeply and more broadly about sort of the long sort of influence of the West African Caribbean press and even the global. The networks that. That are created and the people behind it as well in the lives and cultures and communities. So I just want to say thank you so much. It's been a joy and a privilege to speak with you about your work, and I hope our listeners will read your book and read it with great interest and your future work as well, and look forward to hopefully speaking with you as your sort of other research develops and you continue to work on these very interesting and valuable topics. So, again, thank you so very much and appreciate your time, and it's been great to speak with you on the New Books Network.
- [51:42]
B
Thank you very much.