Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal

Author:Priyamvada Gopal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

With the memories of the American pogroms fresh in his mind, McKay was insistent that his rebuttal derived less from the fact of his being a black man himself than from well-founded anxiety at the inevitable ‘further strife and blood-spilling between the whites and the many members of my race, boycotted socially and economically’, that such propaganda would help incite. 60 In fact, the poet’s powerful voice did bring to bear upon his intervention vital insights shaped by the experience of being a black man in a colonial and white-supremacist order. These enabled him to illuminate the British white left’s racial and national biases, implicating it in the structures of white domination. They also helped him make the case for a serious and genuine universalism that was predicated not on white humanitarianism, but on taking seriously the fact of an unequal global order in which the black experience of racial-capitalist oppression had to be integral to an understanding of world history. McKay’s use of the ‘lens of race’ was not one that segregated black working-class experience as incommensurable with others; it allowed for common cause to be made in the face of racial stratification, rather than the identity of working-class interests being simply assumed. McKay was grappling with problems that retain urgency in our own times: how is it possible to come up with a shared vision of emancipation and social justice that has universal resonances and scope, but does not lose sight of vastly different historical experiences which often come into conflict with one another? How can an identity of class interests be constructed when the experience and operation of class also rely on a racial hierarchy? My argument in the remainder of this chapter, which looks at McKay’s work for the Workers’ Dreadnought and at the pioneering collaborative anthology Negro , edited by the poet Nancy Cunard, is that there were serious attempts during the interwar period to ‘teach race’ and make blackness matter on the British left, which, in tandem with the growing pan-African presence in Britain, are an important part of the story of metropolitan anticolonialism (and anti-racism). These pedagogical projects often took the form of collaboration and collective publishing in which radical white allies (both women in this instance) encouraged and facilitated the emergence of radical black anticolonial voices into the metropolitan public sphere, using their institutional and social networks to this end and often emerging as notable anticolonial figures themselves. These collaborations allowed for difficult, often awkward, conversations to take place, and were a vital part of the attempt to undo paternalism and replace it with a politics of radical, if often uneasy, solidarity. The universal would be aspired to through an understanding of the particular; world-historical knowledge would be accessed through the epistemology of the margins.

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