Black Insurgency: the long struggle for land and national independence
Date
2025
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The goal of Black Insurgency is to intervene in the classical period of Black Power Studies to produce scholarship that argues the perspectives of understudied organizations and activists who were not interested in reshaping American democracy, but rather sought to dismantle U.S. imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, in-favor of Black self-determination. Land is the paradigm through which Black Insurgency examines a protracted struggle against domestic colonialism by Black radical organizations. Political violence by these organizations was the mechanism by which an overturning of the colonial order could manifest Black self-determination. Violence against the state was characterized as revolutionary action, necessary to topple the United States as a colonial regime that had been oppressing African-Americans. Organizations like, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), who embodied revolutionary Black nationalism, are either misunderstood or understudied within the field of Black Power Studies. Black Insurgency will intervene into the scholarship on Black Power to argue that not only was resistance as political violence an essential strategy for self-defense, but also a tactical response to the long-standing colonial war against Black America, while in pursuit of a Black nation-state. These revolutionary Black nationalist organizations and activists are ideologically similar in their approach to Black self-determination and demonstrate a central radical response within the Black Freedom Struggle that must be carefully engaged. The analysis of internal colonialism, Third World internationalism, armed struggle, land, and national independence are the politics of anti-imperialism by organizations that wish to dismantle U.S. imperialism internally, while simultaneously achieving national independence.
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Keywords
Black Liberation Army, Black radical tradition, Republic of New Afrika, Revolutionary action movement, Revolutionary Black nationalism