Africa World Now Project

Matt Birkhold approaches his contribution to the study of working-class intellectual praxis with important questions that seek to identify, map, and access a range of individuals, organizations, and intellectual and political ideological development in an important era, in an important city. Not just any city, but a place where capital saw an aggressive leap in its exploitative and repressive accumulative practices, Detroit. There have been many books, studies, articles, discussions that explore and examine the Black Power movement. In fact, there has been the development of Black Power Studies, another professional-based academic project created mainly in the minds of those...

What does it mean, in this moment – echoes of and the culmination of moments before, to teach, learn, share, and evolve within increasingly violent conditions. What is and where are our (your) terrains of struggle for the Black working class, heretical intellectuals, and inherently rebellious minded youth? What are our weapons? Where do we find our center? Upon what do we build our barriers of resistance? How do we organize a people who do not, yet, fully know, they should be organized? What is the meaning of joining an organization, when the organization is content to be caught in a cy...

W.E.B. Du Bois at the second annual meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, August 19, 1906, captured an early idea of the Black University concept in his speech titled: An Address to the Country. Du Bois writes: “And when we call for education, we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girl...

A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans w/ Nubia Kia by Africa World Now Project Collective

What we you hear next is a recent community dialogue that explored the impact of Africa on El Hajj Malik El Shabzz’s thought and practice and Malik Shabazz’s impact on Africa. What we are concerned with, specifically, with this dialogue is the impact of East Africa, generally, revolutionary Kenya, in particular on Malik Shabazz’s thought and practice. We pay attention to attention to the evolutions of Malik Shabazz’s clarity on the role of revolutionary struggle through his direct relationship with revolutionaries in Kenya [East Africa more broadly]. The question[s] that framed this dialogue were: 1.What was the...

History, the writing of history, can be a messy process. Movement history, that is an exploration and examination of the forces that constitute struggle, its successes and on-going defeats adds even more complexity to understanding and the uses of history. Specifically as it relates to the building of a historical consciousness that is necessary to wage contemporary struggle. This notion, when applied to Southern Africa’s liberation struggles, is useful when attempting to delineate and extract frameworks for understanding current conditions and building liberatory objectives, particularly if the objectives are motivated by the desire to not reconstitute past mistakes. The pr...

We are honored to have with us, again, The Honorable Fravia Marquez Silva, 2nd Advisor To Venezuela’s National Assembly and Spokeswomen for Cumbe International and recently launched Bring The Back Movement and Venezuela’s Charge D’Affaires to Belgium and Venezuela’s Preeminent Trade Unionist H.E. Ambassador Marcos Garcia. This program explored: 1) The effects of US imperial aggression on the working class in Venezuela? 2) The [immediate and long term] impact on the working class throughout the hemisphere? 3) What are some ways the working class in the Americas can support the working class in Venezuela that can possibly be expanded...

The struggle of the LRBW was centered on the political development of Black workers inside the development of global capitalism in the United States and within a leading sector of capitalist production in the early and mid-twentieth century, which was then, the auto-industry. This socio-economic location molded a section of Black workers into working-class revolutionaries. The historical moment that shaped LRBW was located at the nexus of the post-World War II capitalist expansion and the beginning of capitalist globalization, rooted in the new technical evolution of the forces of production: a turn to industrial automation of the workplace. The very...

This cannot be repeated enough, as the dialectical relationship between anti-colonial praxis and the colonial logic of capital becomes ever more fascistic, we must be ever more clear on how violence is necessary to distort and make imperceptible … the possibilities of a future. Simply put, the ever more overt application of violence as a means to maintain oppressive social structures that guide the formation of consciousness, the more it arrests our ability to engage with ‘the beyond struggle’, beyond the now moment. The vast majority of us are caught within the cyclical patterns of manufactured realities of capitalist imagination. Capital needs...

It was 1839 and Frank and Lucy McWorter were getting married for the second time. The wedding was a reaffirmation of their love and a recommitment to all they’d built together. They had come to Illinois with four of their children and built a farm of golden wheat fields and towering stalks of corn. Though there was plenty of symbolism in their renewed vows, the McWorters remarried for a more pragmatic reason — they had been enslaved in Kentucky when they first committed to each other, but such marriages were rarely respected by U. S. courts. They had still been enslaved when...

Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, w...

Abolition, Labor & the Palestine Question by Africa World Now Project Collective

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive in how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Williams, and Medgar Evers. There are, have been, and will be an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and colloquium that explore and contextualize them, individually, and together. What we intend to offer is an identification of the continuities and discontinuities with the conditions and...

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive of how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Medgar Evers. There are and have been, thus far, an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and consortium on the life of Malcolm. All of them are important in one way or another. We are not here to critique, diminish, distort any of them...

Writing in ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’, Josh Myers, building on the thought of Fred Moten, opens with this: “the history of Blackness in D.C. is a testament to the fact that a sound can and did resist. Myers article is derived from a conversation he had with Maurice Jackson where they explored his work titled, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. In it, Maurice Jackson explores what he calls “Great Black Music” and sports in both the history of W...

Southern Worker Action Summit 2025 by Africa World Now Project Collective

Notions of time and space are fundamental to orienting one’s place in various experiences. Mapping time/understanding temporality allows us to coordinate ourselves on the map of human geography [shout out to John Henrik Clarke]. But what happens when we understand that time is colonized – a colonial construct – devised as a mechanism of capitalism that maximizes aggressive accumulation and deteriorating processes of human and natural resource extraction? A faint distortion, intentionally designed, to arrest the capacities of a people or peoples to see beyond the moment, limiting the collective capacity to envision a future, not only materially, but non-materially. A proc...

Frantz Fanon wrote, you know the famous, often quoted but less applied dictate: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” What if we are to intentionally engage this thought by asking, are we on the edge of betraying our mission? Have we even discovered it? Moreover, what can we do to fulfill it? How we go about engaging Fanon’s work gives rise to the corresponding need to reflect on what is urgent, usable, and instructive about his work – identifying the reason that his work matters and is of political consequence in the curr...

“Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its Bosom … There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized With the echoes of George Jackson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric J. Robinson, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis et al., Felicia Denaud & Josh Myers meditate on the moment in crisis.

What you will hear next is Pt II of a four (4) part series where we explore, autobiographically, the origins of Modibo Kadalie’s perspectives on direct democracy, autonomy, Black radical labor history, and Pan Africanism. Pt. II builds upon the autobiographical framework, Modibo outlined in Pt. I [so, do not forget to tap in]. This part of the conversation will explore, in more detail, Modibo’s experience in Detroit, paying attention to the efforts to develop a sharper analysis that can inform various movements more clearly, then and now. Pt. IV will provide a few thoughts on moving forward. Our show...

What you will hear next is Pt III of a four (4) part series where we explore, autobiographically, the origins of Modibo Kadalie’s perspectives on direct democracy, autonomy, Black radical labor history, and Pan Africanism. Pt. I + II builds upon the Modibo’s autobiographical framework [so, do not forget to tap in]. Pt. III will explore, in more detail, Modibo’s experience in Detroit, paying attention to the efforts to develop a sharper analysis that can inform various movements more clearly, then and now. Pt. IV will provide a few thoughts on moving forward. Our show was produced today in solida...

The idea of democracy and its attendant operative mechanism, democratic citizenship, specifically the right to belong, is often lauded as a gift of Greco-Roman sociopolitical thought and Western European and American cultural contributions to a specific conceptualization of what comes to be known, in academic discourse, ‘modernity.’ From this historico-cultural perspective, a concept was needed to determine what it means to be human and belong in a particular form of sociopolitical organization and economic logic. However, moving beyond rhetoric and paying critical attention to the origins of this worldview, democratic citizenship—as expounded by the Athenians, the lauded form of sociop...

In the introduction of his recently published, Jacob H Carruthers and the Restoration of An African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert, Kamau Rashid [2024] posits that: “One of the central concerns evident in the scholarship of Jacob H. Carruthers was the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Although he acknowledged the importance of studying systems of oppression, he argued that such structures rested upon the foundation of Western thought, forms of knowledge that facilitated the formation of our most current systems of domination. In addition, these forms of knowledge also serve the primary function to maintain a particular world or...

The collectively generative nature inherent in the interdependent relationship between technology, the communal means of production and distribution and innovative physical and creative intellectual work is distracted and co/opted by the need to extract the value of this relationship as structured from the capitalist logic of labor. The sole purpose of this is to maintain an aggressive and exclusionary accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. The creative and inquisitive nature of human social and cultural capacities feed the extractive forces of capitalism. The necessity to disembody knowledge production and sever the symbiotic relationship between all sentient...

ADIFF DC Aug. 2, 2024 on Latino Media Collective @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film NEGRITA is featured on WPFW'S Latino Media Collective. Guests include Magdalena Albizu the director and producer of NEGRITA and Eddie Bailey producer and editor of NEGRITA and CEO of the Savoy Media Group. NEGRITA is a documentary about the Afro-Latina identity and experience in the United States. In their own words, empowered, self-affirming educated Afro-Latinas, located around the United States, share their experiences of living with a changing, often contested identity in a racialized society and how it affects their personal and professional lives. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM...

ADIFF DC Aug. 1, 2024 on #UMustLearn @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? is featured on WPFW'S We The People guest Maximina Juson the director of ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE?--Throughout American history, the Electoral College has dramatically impacted American politics and society, particularly with respect to vote erasure of the minority party vote. Featuring commentary by scholars Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dr. Carol Anderson, and Dr. Paul Finkelman, cameo performances by Kelly McCreary, Boise Holmes, Tyee Tilghman, Veralyn Jones, Peter Jerrod Macon and stunning animation by Pierre Bennu. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune...

ADIFF DC Jul. 31, 2024 on We The People @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI is featured on WPFW'S We The People. Guests include Charles Uwagbai the director of THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI--With his life in jeopardy and jail almost a certainty, one question remains, how could a farm boy bring down the global financial system and how far is the international world order willing to go to silence his story? The Wall Street Boy, Kipkemboi tells the story of...

ADIFF DC Jul. 30, 2024 on Voices with Vision @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE is featured on WPFW'S Voices with Vision. Guests include Matthieu Verdeil the director of CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE--Rebellious figure of the Harlem Renaissance, precursor of literature and of the black cause, this unclassifiable author wandered for more than 10 years in Europe, frequenting the artistic and political avant-gardes. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Voices with Vision live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the...

The use of forum, colloquium, and festivals to center African/a intellectual creative cultural production flows rhythmically alongside the long tradition of Pan-African tendencies. This historical continuity and our duty to move within its legacy is a project that the International Colloquium at the International Black Theatre Festival, that we [AWNP collective] have the pleasure to coordinate, is the explicit dictum that guides it creation. Furthering our work in this Pan-African genealogy is intentional. Our theme this year was titled: ‘Echoes of FESTAC ’77’. The primary objectives of FESTAC ’77 was to “provide a forum for the focusing of attention on the enormous r...

On August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become e...

Today, we will listen to General Baker from a 2010 talk he gave at the U.S. Social Forum held in Detroit where he maps the history of struggle in Detroit, the formation of radical workers movements, and the legacies of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 1941, right after his family had moved north from Augusta, Georgia. General Baker’s father worked for Midland Steel in the 1940s, and later in a job with Chrysler. The Baker family settled in a home in Southwest Detroit. Gen Baker grew up in a union household, and often at...

re/posting from our archive ... from 7+ years ago. a lot to grasp here!

This discussion features Mukasa Dada and Obi Egbuna Jr. We focus on contemporary struggles of youth and student movements, globally. With a focus on the ongoing fight for Black liberation and the need for solidarity across different oppressed groups. In order to accurately understand the potentialities of the moment, the development and maintenance of a historical consciousness alongside organizing efforts that challenge imperialism, neo-colonialism, and police brutality through direct action and community engagement are presented for discussion.

Black working-class contributions to the Cuban revolution are immense, yet somehow often neglected in discourses around revolutionary Cuba. The long history of African resistance and cultural contributions to Cuban society, which has been intricately connected to global Black freedom movements has been in rhythmic continuity til present day. The continuities are clear and important on many levels – that is on the level of internal, as confronting internal contradictions specifically the necessity to fight the colonially structured vestiges of racism in Cuban society is an added terrain of struggle. As well as external, the constant assault on the Cuban peoples by U...

Matthew Quest in CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition, examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest specifically explores James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveal hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition, disputes that promoted evolution in thought and practice that must be taken up today. CLR, the elder, was not al...

According to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States. “This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and late...

In an article for Insurgent Notes, Matthew Quest asks, What Type of Historian Was CLR James? CLR James, native of Trinidad, was a historian with a speculative philosophy of history. He brought these methods to his narrative of Haiti in The Black Jacobins (1938), and later in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). James was influenced by historians of the French Revolution, while his approach was shaped by Leon Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the Edwardian radicals GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both literary men who wrote polemical histories sympathetic to t...

Image: Fran Beal Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is the final installment, Pt. III – Applying Malcolm In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm...

Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is Pt. II - Black Workers & Malcolm X In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus...

In November 1990 [1-4], more than 3,000 people from 25 countries attended the Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference held in New York City. More than 100 speakers led 24 sessions that deeply explored, contextualized, and situated El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in the genealogy of Black radical internationalism as a Pan Africanist. There is an argument that can be made that El Haj Mailk El Shabazz is an archetype of what I have argued elsewhere as a critical Africana human rights consciousness. This praxis [the intellectual production and the Black radical and revolutionary practice that it produces, is in fact...