The Anticolonial Front
The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960

This book connects the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe.

John Munro (Author)

9781316638415, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 March 2020

345 pages, 18 b/w illus.
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'John Munro provides a detailed study of how decolonization remained a persistent goal within the American left in spite of pressures from totalitarianism and imperialist orthodoxy in the 1930s to an emergent neoliberalism in the present day.' Brenda Gayle Plummer, University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is a transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. John Munro charts the emergence of an anticolonial front within the postwar Black liberation movement comprising organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture and leading figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O'Dell and C. L. R. James. Drawing on a diverse array of personal papers, organisational records, novels, newspapers and scholarly literatures, the book follows the fortunes of this political formation, recasting the Cold War in light of decolonisation and racial capitalism and the postwar history of the United States in light of global developments.

Introduction
1. Popular front, anticolonial front and United States empire from World War to Cold War
2. Present at the continuation: Manchester and the postwar resumption of anticolonial politics
3. The youth and the unions
4. Three Cold War texts and a critique of imperialism: the anticolonial front in print
5. Resilient resistance: the uneven impact of anticomminism
6. Back to the international arena: Bandung and Paris
7. Independence: the first stage of neocolonialism
8. Toward the sixties
Epilogue: the tragedy of imperial neoliberalism.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], History of the Americas [HBJK]