Abstract
Moving Against the System was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘epochal’ year 1968, when a global upsurge in radical political activity took place. In this study, David Austin recounts the convening of the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, one of the most important black internationalist gatherings since the second world war, and assesses its considerable impact on left and Third Worldist politics. Austin brings to light the numerous personal and ideological trajectories that moved through the Congress that would go on to have significant influence on North American Black Power politics, the emergence of a Caribbean New Left and the forging of international solidarities in opposition to racism and imperialism.
The book comprises an insightful introduction by Austin followed by an edited collection of noteworthy papers and presentations given at the Congress by leading Pan-African, Black Power and black internationalist thinkers including C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael and Richard B. Moore. These have been edited to provide a depth of context for the modern reader that, in many ways, augments the original texts and transcripts as theoretical source material. The inclusion of the audience’s responses in the empirical chapters enlivens the work.
Austin’s introduction picks out several core theoretical currents that shaped and ran throughout the Congress. Firstly, he notes the importance of black historical memory in the presentations and the potential to chart alternative decolonial futures by confronting the impacts of colonisation and slavery. To quote Austin: The organizers . . . understood the congress and the use of history as a significant step toward not simply authenticating the past, but ultimately confronting the economic and cultural underpinnings of white economic and political dominance and the presumption of cultural superiority that undergirded it in what they referred to as the ‘second emancipation’: that is to say, the struggle for freedom in the post-slavery, post-colonial era. (p. 15)
This work of historical interrogation is demonstrated in papers by C. L. R. James on the Haitian Revolution, Robert Hill on Marcus Garvey and Walter Rodney on African history. Black and African historical experience is excavated in order to inform contemporaneous analysis and political praxis. James draws comparisons between the Haitian and Cuban revolutions and traces a lineage of black revolt from Haiti to the US Civil War to the Mau Mau uprising; Hill positions Garveyism as the direct antecedent of the developing Black Power movement and urges his audience to move beyond the limitations of Garvey’s thought; Rodney produces a revisionist, anti-racist history of African cultural and communal practice in order to challenge Euro-American cultural imperialism.
Another of Austin’s themes is the emergence of Black Power as a political movement as well as a theoretical development, which would go on to significantly shape politics in North America, the Caribbean and broader Third World. By including presentations from a number of central thinkers within the North American and Caribbean Black Power movements (Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, Harry Edwards) the book gives an insight into the development of Black Power thought and analysis at a key moment. These papers depict a complex analysis of black oppression that dissects the oppressive matrix of racism, capitalism and imperialism and proffers a global revolutionary consciousness that could facilitate transnational, anti-imperialist solidarities across the Third World, without being reduced to a narrow conflict between black and white.
Crucially, Austin draws attention to the input of black women in the organisation and convening of the Congress. Characteristic of the gender politics of radical black movements of the period, ‘the most glaring weakness of the congress was the total absence of women speakers’ with only one woman being known to have taken to the speaker’s podium. Austin highlights the influence of women such as Barbara Jones, Anne Cools and Joan Jones on the Congress’s theoretical and logistical construction and identifies a lack of any serious engagement with the sedimented oppression faced by black women and the masculinist constructions of black revolutionary activity. Whilst there are no presentations from the Congress by women that can be reproduced in this text, Austin does include an article by Barbara Jones published in the McGill Reporter, where she speaks to the Congress’s gender dynamics and the elision of black women from its historical record.
Moving Against the System provides an excellent account and analysis of the Congress of Black Writers as a momentous, international gathering of leading black intellectuals and political actors – that would resonate across black radical and left politics globally in the following years. And, as Austin notes in the opening passages, an analysis of the Congress issues has salience for our own present as (neo)colonialism, (neo)imperialism and capitalism, articulated through structures of racial stratification and supremacy, still serve to oppress black and non-white peoples across the world.