ABSTRACT
In recent years debates over the shift toward a new black politics have proliferated from local radio talk shows to the front pages of the New York Times. To many who want to believe in a color-blind postrace society, this new black politics might even seem to signal the end of a specifi c “black politics.” But such a naive or utopian prognostication depends on the assumption that, as Cornell Belcher comments for the New York Times, black politics has always been a nationalist-based politics necessary to fi ght a white establishment during the Civil Rights Era. There is, however, a more complex history that we need to “carry around,” one that makes some of the trends of a hybrid twentieth-fi rst-century black politics less new than re-emergent, less national than coalitional and transnational, less refl ective of the experience of an university-trained post-Civil Rights Era elite than of working-class migrants and political refugees in an age of US nation and empire building. While it has become commonplace to argue that the international mobility of workers within contemporary global capitalism has given rise to new forms of transnational identity and political subjectivity,
African Americans were among the earliest border-crossing labor migrants, particularly within the development of the nineteenth-century empires of capital. These itinerant African Americans, moreover, left a written history of their complicated and layered cultural and political consciousness, one that has been lost or inadvertently sidelined in the retrospective projection of twentieth-century nation-based identity politics.
