Interrogating “Black Marxism” in Paul Landau’s Spear

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Notes

1 Landau, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, 12.

2 For example, Arunima et al., Love and Revolution in the 20^th Century Colonial and Postcolonial World; Erlank, Convening Black Intimacy: Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa, Baderoon and Lewis, Surfacing: On being Black and Feminist in South Africa, Healy-Clancy, “Writing from Johannesburg: Nadine Gordimer in the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Soske and Walshe, Ties That Bind: The Politics of Friendship in South Africa.

3 Arunima et al., Love and Revolution, “Introduction,” 11.

4 See particularly Soske and Walshe, “Introduction,” in Ties That Bind; see also Nuttall, Entanglement.

5 Steinberg, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, 176.

6 For the South African literature, see for example van Diepen, The National Question in South Africa and Webster and Pampallis, The Unresolved National Question in South Africa: Left thought under Apartheid and Beyond. For elsewhere, see for example Bedasse et al., “AHR Conversation: Black Internationalism”; Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995; and Rickford, ‘To Build a New World’: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity.”

7 Badiou, “Lessons of the yellow vest movement.”

8 Landau, Spear, 173.

9 See for example Claudia Jones, “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt.”

10 Cited in Asad Haider, “Black Marxism,” 1081; see also Cheryl Higashida on Claudia Jones and race versus nation, Black Internationalist Feminism, 22. For Kunene link, see Carole Boyce Davies, To the Left of Karl Marx, 231.

11 CLR James, “The Historical Development of the Negro in the United States.”

12 James, George Padmore and Decolonization from below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 39. Hakim Adi affirms this point in his analysis of Padmore’s departure from the Comintern. Adi, Pan Africanism: A History, 79.

13 James, George Padmore and Decolonization from below, chapter 6.

14 Landau, Spear, 174.

15 Ibid., 276.

16 Bunting, Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary: A Political Biography.

17 Lodge, Red Road to Freedom, 420.

18 Landau, “The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’.”

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Rachel Sandwell

Rachel Sandwell is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. Her research explores the intersections between women’s politics and national liberation movements in South Africa and in transnational contexts. Her articles have appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal of Women’s History, and The Journal of Southern African Studies.