Locating Palestine in Pre-1948 Black Internationalism

Abstract

This essay locates Palestine in the African-American global imaginary from 1850–1948. During this period more than a dozen African Americans published travel accounts detailing their exploration of Palestine. The travel narratives reveal that Palestine was an ambivalent geography for African Americans; it was rendered through what Edward Said called orientalism while also identified as an important scene of emancipation and exodus. Moreover, during this long period of history, colonial rule over Palestine changed, as did racial politics within the Occident. Thus at various moments, African-Americans wrote as orientalists, territorial Zionists, and Pan-Africanists. Attending to the complexities of African-American writing about Palestine shows how colonialism structures Diasporic thought, while also revealing previously ignored routes linking African Americans to the Arab/Islamic world.

Keywords:

• colonialism
• diaspora
• orientalism
• palestine
• pan-Africanism
• zionism

Notes

Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956).

Wright's trip to Bandung was partially funded by the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization later shown to be a front for the CIA and State Department. See Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 66.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994).

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vitage, 1979).

See, for example, Robert Weisbord and Richard Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Imagination (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985). Also see Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion and Culture in America (New York: Plume, 1996).

But for a couple notable examples, such as Cedric Robinson's classic, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000) (reissue), parts of Melanie McAlister's wonderful Epic Encounters: Culture Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), and Scott Trafton's recent Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth Century Egyptomania (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), there remains very little consideration of the Middle East in African-American political and intellectual thought.

These categories are somewhat arbitrary and they are in no way exclusive. Pan-Africanists, to take one example, could also be Christian Zionists (as in the case of William Sampson Brooks). I use the category in order to show how the travel writing was shaped by a particular set of political and religious motives.

David Dorr. A Colored Man ‘Round the World. Malini Johar Schueller, ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 1999 [1858]).

For an excellent essay on Blyden's fascination with Palestine see Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Edward Wilmot Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine (London, T.J. Sawyer, 1873), p. 136 and 141.

Teage was one of the founding fathers of Liberian independence that penned that country's Declaration of Independence.

Blyden, The Jewish Question (Liverpool: Lionel Hart & Co., 1898).

Ibid. For a discussion of post-nationalist and internationalist African-American politics see Nikihl Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Also see Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005).

Ibid. pp. 107–115.

Blyden, “Mohammedism and the Negro Race,” Methodist Quarterly Review (January, 1877), p. 111.

Daniel P. Seaton, The Land of Promise: Or, the Bible Land and its Revelation (Philadelphia, PA: Pub. House of the AME Church, 1895), p. 15.

W.L. Jones, The Travel in Egypt and Scenes of Jerusalem (Atlanta, GA: Converse and Wing Pub. Co., 1908).

William Sampson Brooks. Footprints of a Black Man (St. Louis, MO: Eden Publishing House Print, 1915).

<http://www.israelipalestinianprocon.org/populationpalestine.html#sources1>.

See Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

See, for example, Nikihl Singh, Black is a Country. For a story of the Negritude movement, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Also see Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1996).

Carolyn Bagley, My Trip Through Egypt and the Holy Land (New York: Grafton Press, 1928), p. 187.

Adam Clayton Powell, Palestine and Saints in Caesar's Household (New York, R.R. Smith, 1939), p. vii.

See Nikihl Singh's Black is a Country. For a more general discussion of how the Cold War changed African-American internationalist politics, see Von Eschen's Race Against Empire and Plummer's A Rising Wind; Gerald Horne's Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986). Although the Cold War changed the context of Black internationalism, it is also important to note that many African Americans continued to embrace anti-Colonial politics during the 1950s and 1960s.

Earl Lewis. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review, (1995) 100:3, pp. 765–787.