ABSTRACT
This chapter examines key thinkers, organizations, events, and movements to trace the intellectual and political ascent of Black Internationalism as the Pan-African enunciation of broader trans-territorial leftwing insurgencies. The 1945 Pan-African Congress, with its emphasis on Black proletarian agency, workers’ struggles, labor militancy, and immediate independence, represented the flowering of African descendants’ trans-territorial leftwing activism into Black Internationalism that, by Bandung Conference of 1955, was bearing fruit. Black Internationalism is thus a conceptual framework that illuminates ecumenical anti-capitalist modes of analysis, struggles for liberation, and efforts at world making emerging from the local, national, and global conditions of African people. Moreover, Black Internationalism is ethical practice, an alternative epistemology, and radical praxis. Ethically, it is the practice of cooperative social activity based on shared values, a common conception of “social good,” and mutual comradeship. Self-determination in context of Black Internationalism was key to cultivating world in which African descendants had full control over their political, economic, social, and cultural destinies.
