Exploring how Caribbean Black Power ideas and movements circulated across islands and continents
This volume brings together established and emerging scholars to highlight the circuits of solidarity that linked Black Power activism in the Caribbean to various struggles in the diaspora and beyond. Contributors trace how people and ideas moved across islands and continents, establishing the Caribbean and its activists as central to the story of global Black Power.
Chapters in this collection discuss topics including the 1968 Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, the Walter Rodney demonstrations in Jamaica, and the activism of Roosevelt Douglas. They cover Caribbean and Black British radical presses, the international campaign in support of Desmond Trotter in Dominica, anti-monarchy movements in Barbados and St. Vincent, the development of tax havens in the Caymans as a response to Black Power, and Puerto Rican radical traditions. Throughout, the volume underlines how Black Power was suppressed at the global level, and the ways activists resisted.
These essays show the importance of diasporic spaces as places of encounter, connection, and mobilization of radical Black activism beyond national and imperial borders. Circuits of Black Power challenges assumptions about the scope and reach of late twentieth‑century global Black liberation movements, showing their continued legacies and relevance in the present day.
Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Contributors: Michael West | Matthew Smith | Irving André | Elanor Kramer-Taylor | Naomi Oppenheim | Rodney Worrell | Tennyson Joseph | Afi Martin | Grace Carrington | Martha Arguello | Debby de Vlugt
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Circuits of Black Power addresses questions of racial marginalization of the Black majority in the Caribbean and the struggle, one that is still active and continuing, for full recognition.
This volume reminds us that Black power in the Caribbean reached far beyond borders, nurtured solidarities in the diaspora, built global movements and activist networks, worked across languages and beyond Cold War divides. By tracing these histories, we find ways to continue insurgent dreams.
