On the Black International Gaze

Defining the Gaze

For this special issue, the Souls editor posed a pointed provocation amid heightened attention on Palestine: “there are also important debates about what the renewed focus on Palestine occludes. What about genocide in Sudan and the Congo? And what of U.S.-backed Kenyan troops going into Haiti?” I took this set of questions as an invitation to examine the patterns of Black Internationalist political attention and to reflect on how solidarity has cohered in different ways across changing geopolitical conjunctures. To address this inquiry requires reckoning with the transformations in the objects and grammars of solidarity across the genealogy of Black Internationalism itself. Building on historian Chris Tounsel’s analysis of African American engagement with Sudan, I ask why contemporary Black internationalism extends so readily to occupied Palestine yet addresses the politics of contemporary Africa with relative This asymmetry, I suggest, illuminates the residual architectures of participatory politics that continue to shape how Africa figures—symbolically and structurally—within Black International imaginaries of global justice.

This paper attends to Black Internationalist perspectives past and present to address the underlying political-conceptual impasse that has given rise to the dilemma of uneven attention across the simultaneous crises in occupied Palestine and those that persist in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Contemporary African conflicts often present morally ambiguous configurations of state and non-state violence that do not map cleanly onto inherited anti-colonial frameworks. As a result, groups such as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan and the M23 insurgency in the DRC hardly appear as legible political projects in the present or residues of others in the Instead, they may appear with opaque interests or, perhaps, externally orchestrated eruptions of instability. This analytical impasse of interpretation is not incidental, but rather illustrates a transformation in the symbolic and institutional coordinates of Black Internationalist engagement.

Ethiopia provides a revealing index of that transformation. It once condensed sovereignty and redemption into a single political symbol. This significance is tied to its discursive positioning as a site of African military triumph at the late 19th century Battle of Adwa, as a prophesied sovereign in the Rastafarian tradition, and as an emblem of African independence within a hostile and Eurocentric international By the late twentieth century, however, it entered African American political discourse through a different register in the aftermath of Emperor Haille Selassie’s reign, the rise and fall of its Afro-Marxist government, the Derg, and the efforts of members of the Congressional Black Caucus to mobilize famine relief and development policy amidst an unforgiving Cold War political culture in the mid The movement from emblematic sovereignty to a site of policy intervention within a global post-communist condition marks the genre of reconfiguration that this essay names as the compass of the Black International gaze.

This essay empirically follows two threads. First, the historical trajectory of Black Internationalist solidarity from anti-apartheid to Palestine; and second, the epistemic limits of that solidarity as revealed in the neglect of contemporary Sudan. Methodologically, this paper anchors Black Internationalism in African American participation in the South African anti-apartheid movement neither to compound the logic of analogy that tends to link sites of apartheid nor to insist on the efficacy of the demand for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. Instead, my approach centers the end of the anti-apartheid movement as a significant historical inflection point from which we might take a diagnostic of the Black International gaze through multiple texts and gestures as indices of the Black Internationalist paradigm—Jim Crow epistemology.

The Black International gaze is a field of recurring gestures that appear across activist, diplomatic, and intellectual registers. Jim Crow epistemology names an epistemic structure of understanding primed for contexts characterized by social exclusion and the bifurcated legal structures of colonial rule. It is an epistemological inheritance shaped by the memorialization of the struggle against Jim Crow. It is an effective mobilizing approach because the experience of Jim Crow in the U.S. has provided the grammar for Black Internationalists to imagine the continuity of struggle against inherited inequality across distinct contexts. Jim Crow epistemology frames both the study and enactment of Black International politics as participatory struggle in a Manichean contest that shapes where attention and solidarity coalesce. It is the inherited hermeneutic through which Black political consciousness organizes attention to what has long been called the global color line in the shadow of W.E.B. Du Bois. Naming this approach as a particular way of knowing the world reveals how Black Internationalist attention has privileged developing solidarity with struggles that are legible through the lens of racial apartheid and the indefensible immorality of enslavement. Within this frame, solidarity often begins from analogy rather than encounter, and contemporary Africa becomes an object of solidarity primarily when its crises mirror the familiar grammar of U.S. racial domination.

This political imaginary derived from shared experience produced a participatory imaginary that fueled the multiple Pan-African conferences led by W.E.B. Du Bois and his ilk as well as the fight against apartheid in South Yet, as illuminating as this approach has been, its limitation has been a concurrent impasse to maintain a participatory imaginary that can reckon with the ambiguities of contemporary African conflicts, where the lines between victim and perpetrator have become muddled and the transformation between revolutionary insurgence and postwar governance has been deeply disappointing.

The essay proceeds by tracing this paradigm across three registers: its conceptual iteration in scholarly analyses of Black Internationalism, its affective life in contemporary Black punditry, and its institutional consolidation in TransAfrica, a professional NGO that was once the largest Black Internationalist organization in the U.S. These threads are not separate cases but prisms that refract the question that drives this essay: why does contemporary Black Internationalism extend so readily to occupied Palestine but engages so reticently with contemporary African politics? The task of this essay is to reckon with how this epistemic formation renders contemporary Africa—after apartheid and after African independence—illegible within its own terms, a landscape no longer readable through the binaries of socio-political exclusion and precarious inclusion that once guided the compass of Black International action and attention. Making sense of this paradigm ought not to lead to the question of whether earlier forms of Black internationalism were more effective, authentic, or made demands for more profound change. Instead, what is at stake is registering the transformation in the conditions under which internationalist politics take shape and how particular solidarities become intelligible and actionable at different historical junctures.

This essay takes on an ambitious swathe of figures: Ralph Bunche, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Briana Joy Gray, the Black Alliance for Peace, the memoir of Randall Robinson, and an interview with his successor Bill Fletcher Jr. My choice of these figures is not an inherent claim to their respective capacity to represent contemporary Black Internationalism. Instead, I find their engagements with contemporary Africa to be illustrative of broader trends in which commemoration has crowded out critical engagement. My goal is to shed light on some of the tensions within the voices through which Black Internationalist discourse now circulates. As prominent pundits, Gray and Coates have become central voices of mediation through which we might identify the dissonance between inherited conceptual frames and the deeply transformed geopolitical terrain of the contemporary Black world. My attention to Gray is an opportunity to reflect on the circulation of knowledge and understanding about contemporary Congo primarily in the realm of academic expertise. The enduring dominance of Jim Crow epistemology reflects the centrality of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movement-building that has shaped the Black Internationalist worldview. Yet, the durability of that paradigm, like any other, also has its shortcomings. One of which is, perhaps ironically, its disinclination to take African political authorship seriously as a site of state power, the activity of military elites, party oligarchies, cultural projects, and political economic interests that are shaping contemporary African sovereignty and its discontents.

After an engagement with Gray and Coates as two Black pundits within the 21st century media ecosystem engaging with Africa today, this essay traces the rise and fall of TransAfrica to link the end of the anti-apartheid movement to the crisis of solidarity around Darfur and Sudan. The history of TransAfrica illustrates significant moments in the evolution of the Black International Gaze. Perhaps unlike other approaches to the golden age of Black Internationalism, this essay points to an episode of profound disillusionment as illustrative of a turning point in dynamics that constrained Black Internationalist imaginative faculties as it found itself less clearly able to participate in or amplify the demands that shaped post-colonial African politics. The dissolution of the anti-apartheid movement coincided with the decline of a participatory imagination—a constituent-led Pan-African politics through which African American activists once projected a facsimile of their own domestic experiences of repression and resistance. This historical juncture was reflected in the strategic tension foregrounded above in which African American-led international advocacy in Africa increasingly became the purview of elite-led diplomacy marshaled by the Black Internationalist diplomats who entered the U.S. foreign policy establishment. This move effaced the domain of grassroots radicals that typically characterize the collective imaginary of the Black Radical Tradition.

Black and African American solidarity with occupied Palestine has both a long historical precedent in on-the-ground activism and an extensive literature that has examined and chronicled various forms of substantive transnational This transnationalism anchors itself in touchstone moments such as the 1967 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) statement on Palestine or the support of the Black Panther Party for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as their leaders met one another in Algeria and Lebanon in the early 1970s. The literature attuned to these moments illustrates the paradigm of Jim Crow epistemology. They show that Black Internationalism has, especially since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, imagined Palestine as both a mirror and an extension of the global color line, where solidarity with the colonized became legible through conceptualizing the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow as iterations of the logic of colonization set upon Black Americans as an internal My argument is not to rail against the idea of shared struggles but to highlight how the logic of analogy can at the same time limit analysis of the political forces at work across East Africa. The conflicts in contemporary DRC and Sudan are not anti-colonial conflicts, they are struggles over the project of national sovereignty itself, particularly the significance of post-independence militaries and the roles that their generals play in the body politic. These conflicts carry the residues of past insurgencies, protracted experiences of armed conflict, and their own forms of nostalgia for deferred dreams of liberation.

Since anti-colonial leaders in Africa reinterpreted President Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of national self-determination as a demand for a new world order, this ideal has engendered a march toward universal self-determination in which a sovereign Palestine is imagined to be the final goal. What I seek to point to here is what Black Internationalism ought to see more clearly, namely, the political struggles that have emerged after the age of independence and decolonization in Africa in the 1960s. What is at stake is the formulation of a freshly tuned geopolitical compass in which a Black International gaze might remain invested in the shifting contexts of a coeval African political domain.

Much of the literature on African American solidarity with Palestine has framed Black diplomats of the past, namely Ralph Bunche, as a foil for, rather than a model of, Black Internationalism. While Bunche’s mediation efforts led him to be the first Black American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, multiple generations of Black radicals critiqued him as emblematic of liberal integrationist and U.S. establishment politics that were distant from the more radical demands of the Third Worldist For other scholars, the role of Bunche and others is overlooked in favor of the more rhetorically militant solidarities embodied by figures like Malcolm X or institutionally by Historians Ben Talton and Chris Tounsel have recently sought to reintegrate such figures within a broader Black Internationalist tradition in order to highlight the crosscurrents between the Black diplomats and intellectuals who participated in the U.S. government’s international institutions and those who were in confrontation with them. The study of Black Internationalism should therefore be understood as the study of an ongoing debate within a broad spectrum of approaches. The dimensions of this debate, both between the actors themselves and their academic observers, are constituted by agonistic tensions and disagreements, rather than a singular tradition which renders certain forms of activism and advocacy as profane and others as sacred. To build the affinities and solidarities necessary to understand or mobilize a constituency to engage contemporary African conflicts, we must center the multiple forms of African political authorship.

The Politics of Recognition and Participation

About a year after the infamous October 7th, 2023 assault, author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ travel memoir of his time in occupied Palestine and Senegal emerged as a touchstone for how even a liberal Black intellectual celebrity could bear witness to the daily cruelties that Palestinians What he witnessed challenged his assumptions and compelled him to confront his own interpretive limitations. Most importantly, he drew parallels between the experiences of Palestinians and the Jim Crow system in the U.S.—segregation, separate and unequal citizenship, restrictions on domestic movement, and the codification of racial hierarchy. The reception of his text is evidence of the phenomenon at work here. It has been received as a testimony on contemporary Palestine, obscuring the fact that it simultaneously relegates coeval African political life to an ancestral backdrop. This dynamic surfaces in the much shorter-length chapter “On Pharaohs,” where Coates retraces the classic route of Black diasporic return. Framed within what St. Clair Drake called the vindicationist tradition of African diaspora thought, Coates’ narrative meditates on ancestry, recognition, and the search for meaning in Africa as the imagined cradle of Black What is striking is that his time in Senegal also coincided with the political upheaval following the arrest of opposition leader and later Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, and the most intense mass protests and youth mobilization that have occurred in Senegal since the 1960s. Coates’ engagement with Senegal, in contrast to Palestine, was far less concerned with contemporary challenges than a spiritual pilgrimage to the symbolic origins of Blackness. The struggle over political power in Senegal and the massive street demonstrations that likely framed his visit, reflected a broader post-independence pattern recurring across the African continent shaped by a generational antagonism between young activists and an entrenched political class clinging to the symbolic power of national liberationism. These tensions exceed the binaries of a Jim Crow epistemology calibrated to resolving apartheid rather than the trials and tribulations of national consciousness.

As a prominent pundit in progressive Black media, journalist Briana Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast has provided sustained and nuanced coverage of Palestine. Gray’s work is attuned to the human toll of occupation and to the discursive crises provoked by any invocation of Hamas, expressions of solidarity with everyday Palestinians, or the whisper of a critique of Israel across the U.S. political, academic, and media spheres. In numerous conversations with activists and academics, she has provided a platform for the most recognizable advocates for liberation in Palestine. In an outlying episode in 2024, however, she intended to rectify her lack of coverage of contemporary African conflicts by hosting two regional experts on the DRC, Jason Stearns and Christoph Vogel. Their conversation about the Congo became an exercise in the capacity to navigate political complexity in which Gray probed her guests for the “why of it all,” to make sense of the historically layered and multilateral theater of political violence that has shaped the Congo since the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Gray argued that the lack of clarity around this question has become the main obstacle to broader investment and understanding from Global North progressives.

Stearns and Vogel exposed the global economy of attention by grounding the Congo’s wars in regional geopolitics, mineral economies, and the contradictions of top-heavy post-independence militaries where generals vie for influence and financing. Stearns cautioned against the expectation of a messianic savior or a singular utopian horizon. He urged listeners instead to consider how solidarity begins with identifying the “progressive forces” already present within Congolese society amidst conflicts which endure through diffuse and ambiguous logics of disillusionment after failed efforts to end armed conflict.

Gray concluded the discussion of the difficulty to understand contemporary Congo with a gesture to Black Internationalist nostalgia for the DRC, “as a black American who has ten age cohorts named Lumumba, that’s part of my bias here… there is this kind of Pan-African narrative that seems exciting and enticing.” What Gray is gesturing towards here is a paradigm that both allows for the sensation of “personal connection that has the capacity to [make] me feel invested in and wanting to do an episode like this,” to rectify the imbalance in attention to concomitant conflicts. Yet, that very same conceptual paradigm also obscures, as the why remains elusive. The conversation was an iteration of this epistemological quagmire, spinning its wheels in the perennial question, what is to be done? For Gray, “it's not clear to me what kind of interventions, be they diplomatic or consumerist movements to keep your cell phone longer that put pressure on the resource demand, what effect that could actually have on this fighting, which still, I confess, just seems so opaque (emphasis added).” The analytic frame at once rendered Patrice Lumumba into a floating signifier of national liberation, while, at the same time, rendering the conflict in contemporary DRC incomprehensible. This is the function of Jim Crow epistemology in which the last recognizable African political actors become paragons of progressive nostalgia. Effective and robust understanding thus gets mired in a politics of recognition of militant rhetoric and diasporic longing that become prohibitive of a politics of participation. The episode operated as both a vehicle of solidarity and an expression of our analytical impasse—a sustained affective connection to Africa while obstructing a more analytical participatory

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the Black Agenda Report (BAR) stand at the center of contemporary Black political media and organizing. BAP and BAR serve as two of the most consistent sources of an explicitly anti-imperialist, Pan-African, and socialist critique within the U.S. public sphere—spaces where the radical internationalist tradition continues to speak in a landscape increasingly defined by what those same radicals deride as liberal representationalism. Yet, there is an uneven distribution of solidarity within the BAP’s media archive, revealing its own economy of attention in which Palestine emerges as a recurring lightning rod of our progressive hopes while Africa figures as a structural or abstract site of critique. Across BAP’s pages and statements, Palestine occupies a position of emotional and ethical centrality where its crises are framed through genocide, occupation, apartheid, and decolonization. Whereas Africa, though foundational to the organization’s mission, appears largely through ongoing campaigns such as U.S. Out of Africa and Shut Down AFRICOM, that seek to frame the U.S. military presence in Africa as an illegitimate occupier—collapsing African geopolitics into a politics of external interventionism. Within this approach, the white supremacist antagonist of U.S. Jim Crow is replaced with the omnipresent U.S. military industrial complex that reproduces itself off the backs of African resource extraction facilitated by the politics of instability it creates.

This asymmetry reflects an ambivalent commitment to how African political formations have transformed over decades of independence. As the Black International gaze turns its attention towards Africa it becomes hamstrung by an epistemological inheritance of the memory of Jim Crow as the irreducible paradigm of political and moral struggle that ought to guide Black political attention. Within this framework, Palestine’s clarity as a site of visible apartheid resonates with the historical memory of racial subjugation in the United States. Meanwhile, the diffuse and internally contradictory politics of African conflicts appear as incidental epiphenomena and remain inaccessible without a broader repertoire of analytical tools to understand them.

This contrast can be read as the afterlife of a historical shift that accompanied the dissolution of the anti-apartheid movement. The once participatory imagination that had animated a constituent-led Pan-African politics gave way to a professionalized diplomacy carried out by the Black diplomatic elites who entered the U.S. foreign policy establishment. As the BAR has long argued in its critique of the “Black misleadership class,” this transformation marked the absorption of radical energies into the machinery of state and NGO governance, producing a class of Black representatives who speak the language of liberation while reproducing the logics of empire. Within this new configuration, solidarity became a matter of rhetorical stance, contingent on a politics that privileged clear binary crises in which activists can imagine and enact participation, such as in BAP’s annual international month of action against AFRICOM. The result is a narrowed internationalist horizon in which the radical grammar of anti-colonial Pan-Africanist demands persists as nostalgia and the performance of principled stances.

Black Internationalism and its Multiplicity

Discussions of Black internationalism have often been cast in absolutist terms, as debates over whether a sufficiently radical political agenda is present or absent. Yet the distinction between radicals and moderates is more productively understood as an ongoing argument about the form and function of Black internationalism. This debate is inseparable from its protean interpretations of African political life. From contemporary calls for a renewed “Black Internationalism” rooted in shared experiences of racial exclusion to earlier traditions of Pan-African diplomacy, these debates reveal a persistent tension between solidarities organized around analogy and those grounded in the complexities of African political life. Black diplomats and policymakers working within U.S. institutions make this tension especially visible, illuminating a dialectic between radical critique and strategic engagement that ultimately contributed to the institutionalization of Black internationalism in formations such as TransAfrica.

In an essay titled The New Black Internationalism, political scientist Adom Getachew identified a twenty-first-century revival of Du Bois’ emphasis on the shared experience of the world’s oppressed For Getachew, the 2016 Vision for Black Lives platform provided its most comprehensive articulation. The document envisioned deep cuts to the U.S. military budget and the repurposing of military personnel for social reconstruction, what Getachew called a “divest/invest” politics aimed at building a green new society. However, even at its most expansive, this vision remains tethered to a political imagination centered on U.S. empire rather than on African political life. Krystal Strong’s provocative essay, Do African Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter, concluded that many of the contemporary political struggles in continental Africa, namely the “Fees Must Fall” movement in South Africa and “Occupy” in Nigeria, have largely remained beyond the scope of the U.S.-based BLM While Strong situated this lacuna in the current disarticulation of U.S. Black politics from the legacy of Black Internationalism, it is perhaps the legacy of Du Bois itself which has scaffolded what I call the Jim Crow epistemology of the Black International gaze. Drawing on Robert Gooding-Williams’ reading of W.E.B Du Bois and Frederick Douglass in conversation, one can see how the tradition associated with the former oriented Black international thought towards a politics of sovereign leadership and redemption. This orientation offers only limited guidance for grasping the ambiguities of post-independence African politics—contexts which Dubois did not thoroughly witness or analyze, despite his final years and burial in Ghana, for example, standing as a symbol of Black Atlantic

Historian Penny von Eschen has chronicled a dramatic shift in the politics of the African diaspora during the 1950s that marked, for her, the “end of ideology,” and “the collapse of politics.” As she describes, this shift resulted in the profound loss of a political-economic analysis of race contextualized by the history of slavery and colonialism, which became replaced by a lens characterized by “social psychological research on race The so-called end of ideology, von Eschen argued, engendered and exacerbated an approach to Africa as an exotic monolith full of backward and superstitious peoples. These representations had been “disrupted in the late 1930s and 1940s,” and were, as von Eschen reminds us, dwarfed by an approach that, for example, could link the experience of Jim Crow to apartheid in South Africa and other forms of colonial segregation . However, I argue that it was precisely this formulation—shared experiences of social exclusion—rather than the so-called end of ideology, that has crowded out other ways of conceptualizing Black international advocacy, confining it to the grammar of exclusion and redress.

Recent scholarship has framed the role of Black American diplomats in global politics through what political scientist Pearl T. Robinson terms “Pan-African Diplomacy,” a concept that captures how Black American officials and activists helped shape major twentieth-century international Among these figures were Ralph Bunche, who mediated the 1949 Arab-Israeli Armistice; Mickey Leland, who mobilized U.S. famine relief for Ethiopia between 1983 and 1985; and Randall Robinson, founder of the TransAfrica Forum. Yet scholars have also noted the tension underlying this broad diplomatic visibility. From Von Eschen’s “end-of-ideology” position, the civil rights movement produced what she describes as the “ruse of equal civic membership”: the belief that formal citizenship gains at home enabled African Americans to represent the United States abroad, even as deep inequalities persisted For Adom Getachew, this contradiction amounted to a “Faustian bargain,” echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier description of the dilemma facing Black Americans who tolerated or accommodated Cold War militarism in exchange for incremental civil rights In contrast to von Eschen’s argument, Pearl Robinson situates late twentieth-century Black politics as the flourishing and exponential increase in the number of Black Congresspeople and the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). This approach embeds this moment within a broader transformation of Pan-Africanism, from a civil society-led movement rooted in transnational activism to a form of intergovernmental regionalism in Africa, institutionalized through the African Union and related continental

This flourishing of Black staffers and members of Congress included “a new generation of Black Internationalists, many of whom identified politically as Pan-Africanists or anti-imperialists,” and who rejected the idea that working on Capitol Hill was “tantamount to Pearl Robinson therefore offers a broader timeline of Black Internationalism’s multiple permutations in and out of official political institutions. This new generation of Black policymakers, she describes, approached the U.S. not only as an empire but as a site where foreign policy could be oriented in intentional ways and thus offered a domain of politics to be studied, engaged strategically, and grasped—analytically and institutionally. Attention to Africa became a key arena in which Black internationalists operating within U.S. institutions could express progressive commitments muted at home, treating U.S. foreign policy not simply as imperial projection but as a terrain to be shaped through diplomatic and political

By contrast, for the academic observers who criticized those who entered electoral politics, U.S. empire became a free-floating term of reproach, a shorthand for domination with diminishing analytic value. While rhetorically militant and assertive, the terminology of U.S. empire, as a blanket term for the various forms of military, political, and economic pressure exerted by the U.S. on the world, offers little to illuminate the concrete dynamics of, for example, Sudan’s war following its 2018–2019 uprising or the violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo centered on the activity of, and regional support for, the M23 rebels. As academic concepts, empire and the various iterations of imperialism can effectively gesture toward global inequality and outsized political pressure. However, these concepts can also crowd out attention to the mechanisms through which various state, corporate, and civil society actors shape events and institutions on the ground, whether that be national governments, professional associations, the IMF, or armed movements. In this way, a Jim Crow epistemology that readily fits the U.S. Empire into the slot of the white supremacist villain, effectively erases and/or dismisses Africa's revolutionary uprisings as products of Western propaganda that portrays African militants as senseless puppets, perpetrating various forms of political violence at the behest of the current U.S. administration. The result is a form of historical amnesia that renders contemporary African conflicts without their historiography, without precedent, and therefore difficult to interpret. Decades of revolutionary and conservative political formation have been obscured by the narratives of Cold War political theater in which Africa was at best a supporting actor, its late-twentieth-century experience reduced to episodes of intervention as a form of epistemic justice, rather than an intellectual history of political authorship.

Talton’s chronicle of Mickey Leland argues that Black Power politics did not vanish with state repression or electoral success in the 1970s but persisted through the efforts of Black legislators who sought to shape U.S. foreign policy from within Congress. The antagonisms of interpretation within the Black International gaze were felt even within the halls of power where former activists like Leland encountered more professionalized diplomats. The culture of the Cold War made it difficult to organize even within the CBC to garner and maintain support for the Afro-Marxist government of During the late Cold War when Leland was mobilizing this effort, overt engagement with a government aligned with the Soviet bloc carried significant political risks for American legislators, and had to be framed through the seemingly apolitical lens of humanitarian concerns such as relief for Ethiopia’s major famine in the 1980s. At the same time, the Ethiopian revolution that had empowered the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974 was waged against the empire of H.H. Haile Selassie, a quintessential symbol of Black political sovereignty. This Afro-Marxist revolution, therefore, did not easily fit the moral narrative through which many African American intellectuals had interpreted earlier liberation Unlike anti-colonial struggles that could be cast as emancipatory, the violence and internal repression associated with the Derg complicated efforts to situate the regime within the nonviolent and redemptive imagery that has often animated invocations of Black Internationalism.

Both radical internationalists and their elite moderate counterparts operated largely within elite networks of advocacy, policy debate, and intellectual exchange whose audiences were relatively limited. For the broader African American public, Africa increasingly appeared through the circuits of mass culture, the reach of which far exceeded that of activist organizations or policy institutions. The surviving vision of Africa from Black America reflected a cultural impulse toward the restoration of prestige. It produced a counter-mythology that sought to replace a degraded image with a dignified one, substituting an Afro-diasporic fantasy kingdom for the ethnographically real Africa that returns the analytic gaze and speaks for In this formulation, Africa appeared primarily as style, heritage, and imaginative empowerment rather than the object of Pan-Africanist political ideology. By the late Cold War period, African American engagement with Africa had begun to shift from revolutionary internationalism toward a more symbolic cultural register that struggled to grapple with the complexities of African politics.

At the end of the twentieth century, Manning Marable and Adolph Reed debated how the significance of the end of segregation and the rise of Black political representation reconfigured Black politics, replacing the populist, participatory energy of the civil rights era with elite-driven agendas and, for Reed, the misuse of collective The collapse of Jim Crow turned Black politics from a mass insurgency into a managed enterprise of professionals and elected officials; abroad, the same shift was visible at the end of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. The rise of this struggle as the issue of a global Black perspective heralded the institutionalization of grassroots-led organizing and participatory imagination into the language of diplomacy, lobbying, and suggestions for intervention. The tension between the radicals and moderates did not forbode the end of Black internationalist politics, it set the stage for institutionalization. As insurgent energies gave way to professional advocacy, solidarity was organized in gala fundraisers, congressional caucuses, and professional NGOs. TransAfrica emerged as the flagship of this new configuration—a vehicle for translating the goals of the Black freedom struggle into the bureaucratic language of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Its formation marked both an expansion of Black Internationalist reach and the beginning of a protracted drift for the international justice agenda from participatory political horizons toward representational diplomacy. The limits of representational democracy at home thus mirrored the limits of representational diplomacy abroad.

The Life of TransAfrica

The 1976 Washington conference of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) marked a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of Black internationalism and laid the groundwork for what would become TransAfrica. When the CBC met in September of that year, they formulated a progressive national policy agenda for U.S.-Africa relations. The conference they convened was comprised of a diverse coalition spanning labor, business, religious, civic, and governmental spheres, such as the NAACP, Greek-letter organizations, and the National Council of Negro The first day of discussions led to the creation of the African-American Manifesto on Southern Africa, which characterized the responsibility of Blacks in America to humanity in general and in relation to who they saw as their revolutionary forebears—Crispus Attucks, W.E.B. Dubois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Amilcar The following day’s discussions coalesced around the need for an enduring institutional Black voice in U.S.-Africa policy—a vision that would take shape as The document they produced at the conference articulated the ethical imperative to dismantle white minority rule in South Africa and Zimbabwe and the South African occupation of They urged the United States to support liberation movements through the Organization of African Unity and, in particular, the resistance of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia against South African expansionism. The manifesto was published in The Black Scholar in 1977 and it encouraged its audience to read the preceding 1969 Lusaka Manifesto through the lens of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, urging them to recognize the revolutionary precedent within the American political tradition itself. The Lusaka Manifesto was an appeal to empathize with the dilemmas that African liberation movements were confronting, balancing armed struggle with international diplomacy as they confronted the choice to “negotiate rather than destroy” or “to talk other than Rather than romanticizing armed struggle on the one hand or diplomacy on the other, this assemblage of manifestoes called for a transnational empathy attuned to the complexities that would characterize political life after apartheid.

Incorporated in 1977 under the executive directorship of lawyer and activist Randall Robinson, TransAfrica Inc. became the voice translating the imperatives of the Black freedom struggle into the language of U.S. foreign policy. In his memoir, Robinson remembers that the idea had grown out of “the broadly recognized need for an institutional mechanism through which African-Americans could be informed, galvanized, and moved to a focused, thoughtful participation in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa and the It was a prodigious task, which Randall Robinson described as turning attention to the “corners of the black world unseen by American public eyes,” such as Haiti, Zaire (contemporarily DRC), Liberia, and Western Sahara, where U.S. policy had also led to apartheid-like conditions. TransAfrica was successful in its principal task, contributing to a “fundamentally different U.S. foreign policy towards the white minority regimes of southern Reflecting on TransAfrica’s record—its victories against apartheid in South Africa and its advocacy for more compassionate immigration policies for Haitians, Robinson conceded that the organization “[had] not changed the variously indifferent and hostile face of American foreign policy toward Africa and the The South Africa campaign evidenced the capacity of diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions to bend the arc of history toward justice. Yet Robinson’s lament suggests that this success was exceptional rather than exemplary, the product of an ultimately fleeting convergence of global and domestic forces unlikely to come together again. Within that reflection lay the foundation of a broader epistemic shift from a politics of grassroots solidarity grounded in the shared experience of social exclusion to one of professional diplomacy, wrenched even from the hands of professional advocacy networks like his.

Robinson’s memoir chronicles his personal experience with how the end of the anti-apartheid movement characterized the unexpected disintegration of international solidarity, exposing between himself and President Nelson Mandela an “underlying ignorance about each other” that the anti-apartheid cause had once After Mandela unexpectedly failed to attend a gala fundraising event, Robinson wondered why the new leaders of South Africa, “inexperienced in both foreign relations and domestic managed to spurn its friends willy-nilly at home and He concluded that their lack of familiarity with the political culture of the U.S. made it difficult to appreciate the outsized role played by advocacy organizations such as TransAfrica in the development of foreign policy. Read as an archive of Black Internationalism’s entanglement with the world of professional diplomacy, Robinson’s memoir chronicles the moment when one of the most significant victories of Black Internationalism—the end of apartheid—also heralded a political eclipse.

What had once been a field of collective struggle, animated by the belief that ordinary people could act on history, was then reduced to the exclusive domain of Heads of State. Mandela and his comrades were no longer interested in collaborating with small-scale constituency-based organizations; “it was with the biggest of governments and the largest of corporations that they (the ANC) wished to be Robinson and his team no longer represented a pathway to the halls of decision-making, they “only reminded them of their centuries-long nightmare of powerlessness and exclusion,” the condition that had defined the ANC’s struggle against colonialism and apartheid and one they wished to

Randall Robinson left TransAfrica and the United States in 2001, a beleaguered progressive jaded by America and Americans. One of the principal failures that Robinson recounted of his work with TransAfrica was their inability to stimulate more robust media attention to the unseen corners of Africa mentioned above. He could hardly galvanize attention even from the “African American opinion makers” because their attention to foreign policy issues followed established trends and veered away from issues Robinson believed “should be of independent and inherent consequence to the Black One such issue was the question of Western Sahara, where U.S. support for Morocco effectively endorsed the Kingdom’s systematic denial of the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination, as asserted by its representative Polisario Front displaced in southern For Robinson, the neglect of Western Sahara underscored how bumping up against the epistemic limits of Black International politics is experienced by activists as a structural frustration. As if echoing a refrain through a genealogy of Black Internationalism, he too reflected on the neglect of Western Sahara: “one of the mistakes I made when I was at TransAfrica Forum, and it was a tremendous oversight, was not making [Western Sahara] a part of our work.” Morocco was, after all, an African and Muslim nation and the site of diasporic fantasy for some Black Americans who have claimed Moorish ancestry. Therefore, the contemporary state of Morocco is not easily legible within the Black International imagination as playing the role of apartheid perpetrator. Like Randall Robinson before him, Fletcher wrestled with the same problem, how to make political struggle in Africa legible within the lexicon of an American audience without an overt white European aggressor. This neglect also demonstrated how the utility of apartheid in South Africa as an analogy for social exclusion elsewhere has been principally effective for mobilization in the cause of Palestinian liberation. The ostensible racial difference between Israelis and Palestinians is easily mapped out by a Jim Crow epistemology in which Israelis are imagined as a white settler population and Palestinians as the racially excluded indigenous population.

The succeeding executive director of TransAfrica Forum was Bill Fletcher Jr., who took over in 2002. When he assumed leadership, he recounted during our conversation, the organization was already struggling for direction. In a 2003 interview with James Early, Fletcher reflects on a fundamental misunderstanding he observed upon taking up leadership, “there was some level of expectation that the same strategies and tactics that were used in the antiapartheid struggle could be essentially lifted up and placed down Conceptually, the challenge was making sense of African political actors, particularly military leadership, who have claimed to act in the name of national liberation while exploiting the working class and suppressing political dissent. As Fletcher argued, “with the development of neocolonialism…the enemies become, in many cases, less clear. They look like us. They often wrap themselves in the flags of Fletcher recalled visiting Swaziland and wondering whether upon his return he could manage to organize African Americans to build a movement against a Black nationalist regime repressing labor organizers and democratic activists. What was at stake was not political apathy but the exhaustion of a framework in which solidarity had come to depend upon the visual expression of racial antagonism.

Fletcher understood the Cold War not only as a period that crushed political organizations but one that dismantled the very paradigm for conceptualizing Black Internationalism as a coherent political “It was the crushing of a framework” that “identified internationalism as being communist” and “left Black folks to largely understand the world through a racial lens.” This racial lens Fletcher Jr. mentions had been foregrounded decades earlier in the political commitments of the African American manifesto, declaring in 1976 that “we do this because we are African Americans.” The authors affirmed that the “destiny of blacks in America and blacks in Africa is inextricably intertwined”—a claim that echoed the Black Internationalist and Pan-Africanist attempt to turn Hegel’s philosophy of history on its head, even as it remained captive to its logic, recasting the march of Spirit as the ascent of the Fletcher argued that the “propensity to look at the world through racial lenses” led to the evasion of complex crises and exposed what he saw as a foundational contradiction of contemporary progressive Black Internationalism. His reflection on the fall of apartheid offered further insight into how the year 1994 itself was an inflection point, when “South African elections take place. African Americans [were] thrilled. Delegations went there. It’s wonderful. And in the same year, close to a million Rwandans are killed in this massive genocide in 90 days, and nobody said a Fletcher offered a blunt counterfactual to clarify the racial lens: “if a hundred Belgian paratroopers had landed in Kigali and killed a thousand Rwandans, we would’ve burned the Belgian embassy down.” Fletcher’s point was not about indifference but rather the limits of the framework itself. Black Internationalism had become a reflex of racial recognition—hamstrung by identification through Blackness abstracted from the political formations of contemporary Africa.

Fletcher eventually left TransAfrica in 2006. At the time, he noted a “lethargy in the board,” a paralysis “rooted in nostalgia” for the anti-apartheid movement of the past. The board wanted to revive “the TransAfrica of 1985,” the era of Randall Robinson’s charismatic authority, celebrity activism, and unanimity of purpose and approach, “and that wasn’t going to happen.” Fletcher understood this nostalgia not just as sentimentality but as the index of a structural limitation. Their yearning for that past, Fletcher implied, reflected a deeper uncertainty about what role Black internationalism could play in a world where formal apartheid had been dismantled and the anti-apartheid struggle no longer lent itself to a global participatory imagination. The limits of a Jim Crow epistemology come into view here, not only as an ideological framework but as a historical inflection point. Black internationalism confronted a new terrain, one that demanded paradigms capable of grasping transformations in African political life beyond the Manichean grammar of good and evil.

Yet the board was keen on resuscitating the past rather than developing new tools to understand the present, Fletcher recounted that a board member demanded that he come up “with an issue around which to rally.” What the board member wanted, he explained, was something that could galvanize the masses “much like the Free South Africa campaign did.” This demand revealed a profound misunderstanding of history. When Fletcher reminded them that the anti-apartheid movement had not emerged from a single charismatic campaign but from decades of transnational coalition-building, grassroots organizing, and moral momentum, “the board majority blew [him] off.” What had become clear to Fletcher after a lifetime of organizing was that “shifting U.S. foreign policy is not a matter of a big demonstration or a series of protests; it’s a protracted battle.” His own political maturation exposed a contradiction within TransAfrica itself, between those who maintained the fantasy that one might rekindle the binary clarity of an earlier era, and those, like Fletcher, who recognized that the terrain of struggle had shifted and the architecture of solidarity could no longer rely on the affective shorthand that apartheid provided.

Like any other lobbying organization, TransAfrica relied on donations, gala dinners, and other fundraising opportunities to accumulate support through causes in which donors could imagine themselves as participants. Without such a cause, the organization was gasping for breath—dissolving, in effect, alongside the anti-apartheid movement, the final anchor of the struggle against racial segregation through which the Black international gaze had fixed its attention on Africa. “One of my board members said to me,” Fletcher voiced the anonymous trustee, “‘Bill, you need to bring us a sexy issue,’ and that’s a quote!” When he responded, asking for an example of a sexy issue, the answer he received was, “‘Well, you know, like the anti-apartheid movement, when we could all get

Solidarity after Genocide Denial

What is at stake with the dissolution of the participatory Black Internationalist imagination emerges most starkly in discourse surrounding Sudan. The genocide in Darfur at the turn of the 21st century, as with the genocide in Rwanda ten years prior, offered a racially confounding context to a Black Internationalist attuned to the Manichean dynamics of Jim Crow and apartheid South Africa. Against this backdrop, for outlets that have long animated radical Black internationalism, Sudan’s 2019 uprising provided a context difficult to interpret within inherited vocabularies of anti-imperialism and racial solidarity. Rather than recognize popular protest as an authentic expression of civil uprising, mass protest was cast as an externally orchestrated effort to destabilize a sovereign African nation, in this case, Omar al-Bashir, who at times has occupied a symbolic position like former Prime Minister of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, as an antagonist to U.S. imperialism. A tension resulted between taking contemporary African protest seriously and defending the principle of African sovereignty. In this concluding section, I reflect on the question of solidarity with Sudan as a political and ethical crisis that exposed the limits of the inherited grammar of Black Internationalism for interpreting sovereignty, racial violence, and popular struggle in postcolonial Africa.

The repressive political culture of the Cold War gradually displaced the language of liberation and self-determination with humanitarianism as the dominant idiom through which African American leaders and organizations engaged the African . By the early twenty-first century, advocacy around Sudan reflected this shift. In 2001, Congressman Donald Payne of the Congressional Black Caucus was arrested outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington, Payne. He was protesting contemporary slavery and genocide in Sudan. Despite his arrest, Payne emphasized his continued commitment to the cause:

Slave raids by the armed forces of Sudan's Khartoum government are being used to gain control of southern oil fields….We will continue pressuring this government until genocide is ended and there is a resolution of these crimes against

After traveling to Sudan, Congressman Payne returned as a staunch supporter of the southern right for self-determination, condemning the north for its alleged genocidal behavior. Multiple African American organizations followed suit, as they could identify a shared social heritage of suffering that had taken shape in the national war of visions being waged between the government in Sudan and their largest opposition, the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army In 1999, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) released a statement, Slavery in Sudan, condemning “a humanitarian crisis which exists in Sudan” due to the National Islamic Front’s “genocidal war in southern Sudan” as they mobilized to quash rebellions in the peripheral regions of the country: southern Sudan, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and Blue The NAACP condemned contemporary slavery and supported unilateral U.S. economic sanctions to compel the practice to come to an end. The firsthand testimonies of survivors of contemporary slavery also piqued the attention of the African American church. The analogy of modern-day slavery readily became a conduit of empathy and a means through which African Americans could imaginatively and substantively intervene in another Black community’s

In the early 2000s, the Save Darfur Movement, an international advocacy group, arose in response to the violence in Darfur that erupted in 2003. Its organizing success cultivated the support of hundreds of religious and political organizations that pushed a divestment campaign, organized rallies, and encouraged individuals to pressure their elected public officials by phone to stop an ongoing genocide in Darfur. But, as Bill Fletcher Jr. recalled, the Black left fractured over Darfur, “you had sections of the Black left who were defending al-Bashir…saying no, no, no al-Bashir is an anti-imperialist.” As Fletcher observed, intra-African repression “was something that split us in the Black Radical Congress,” a sign of how postcolonial sovereignty had come to confound the coordinates of Black Internationalism

Scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani challenged the genocide framing of the Darfur conflict altogether. In his view, the crisis was a case of political violence, not racial Insurgencies by the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in Darfur were protesting longstanding marginalization in Sudan’s peripheries, as nomads and farmers competed for water and land. The government’s brutal response through the Janjaweed militia targeted communities that identified with these rebellions. For Mamdani, this was why the violence seemed like genocide, as the extermination of Africans by Arabs. What was actually happening, however, was a political problem to be resolved between a government and its rebels. The political crisis of Darfur was a theater of resource-sharing tensions to be resolved at the local, national, and regional arenas. The crisis was the outcome of climate-driven migration, a legacy of colonial hierarchies of governance, and a central state that deepened conflict by militarizing and fragmenting social relations on the A 2010 debate between professor Mamdani and human rights activist John Prendergast dramatized the tension between academic precision and moral urgency as a line of students and activists from Darfur in the audience pleaded for immediate recognition and action, participation rather than analysis.

The debate over genocide in Darfur unfolded against the backdrop of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics of Save Darfur saw echoes of the infamous Nayirah testimony of 1990, accusing any critique of al-Bashir as exaggeration or Genocide, it was argued, invited the potential for further invasion, obscured the historical and political complexity of the Darfur region, and stalled attempts at a ceasefire and negotiation. At the time, we pushed back against the easy racial binary—Africans versus Arabs—that framed the violence in Darfur. This critical perspective refused the analogy that would render Arab-identifying Africans as racial oppressors. Without a legible racial antagonist, the moral certainty underwriting “genocide” as a mobilizing frame unraveled. The result was a paralysis of advocacy, as criticism supplanted solidarity. Critics of the humanitarian movement and the frame of genocide generally emphasized the vast discrepancies in the number of casualties forwarded by the Save Darfur organization and various other human rights advocates. For critics like Mamdani, this was a representation of a problematic politics of legitimacy by numbers, wherein positioning the atrocity itself, rather than its underlying conditions, was a foolish motivation for solidarity at best, and, at worst, set a dangerous precedent. Fears of U.S. military expansion into Sudan proved misplaced, however; Washington declared a genocide and then went back to business as usual by imposing sanctions and engaging in diplomatic posturing without In the end, Darfur became less a site of solidarity than a cautionary tale about Western manipulation, as the Save Darfur movement was recast as propaganda masking imperial interests.

Thus, what was happening in Darfur was essentially ignored by critical observers and consigned to the exclusive realm of academic expertise while the humanitarians continued trying to address the urgent situation on the ground. The International Criminal Court’s 2009 arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir provided the foundation for the skepticism about Western intervention while exacerbating the economic and political isolation of the Sudanese government. Before his 2019 ouster, Black Agenda Report portrayed Omar al-Bashir’s government as emblematic of African authoritarianism but also as a victim of Western geopolitical theater. Its editors rejected the genocide framing of Darfur and the ICC’s indictment of al-Bashir as extensions of imperial intervention, treating the crisis as the plight of a besieged anti-imperialist who had become the target of neo-colonial slander.

The collective incomprehension of, and inattention to, today’s war in Sudan between Mohammed Dagalo (RSF) and Abdel Fatah al-Burhan (SAF) is the afterlife of that genocide denial. The RSF descends directly from the Janjaweed militia once mobilized against Darfur’s rebellion, now having reframed itself as a populist force claiming to defend the revolution. Their self-presentation as pseudo-Robin Hoods—occupying the mansions of Khartoum’s elites—in a narrative battle between differently positioned African military leaders is not a political domain in which a Black International public might easily imagine itself as a participant. The compass of Black Internationalism, long guided by U.S. foreign policy and its effects, now finds itself without a true north. This disorientation reveals how Jim Crow epistemology limits the questions we might ask of the political context we inhabit.

Conclusion

If there is to be a new stage of Black internationalism, how might it not only point away from empire but also toward the encounters that emerge after sovereignty? I propose Pan-African geopolitics as a framework for understanding the tensions embedded in the post-sovereign politics of contemporary Africa. This a paradigm that, following Black Internationalism’s continental exponents, is both analytically nimble and methodologically expansive. It can read Ousmane Sembène’s filmography for its interrogation of postcolonial African life through grounded social critique, with Faat Kiné turning to urban modernity, gender, and generational change as sites of both constraint and possibility. These creative registers find their political counterpart in attention to contemporary crises such as that which led to the rupture between the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), where military-led regimes rejected a regional authority they believed to be compromised by western interests, unsettling the liberal democratic norms of international engagement and reanimating the dialectic between moderates and radicals that has always been at the heart of Pan-African political This intellectual transformation has also taken on institutional form in initiatives such as the Pan-African Reconciliation Network (PAREN) and the SOAS Centre for Pan-African Studies as they seek to rearticulate Pan-Africanism through the languages of reconciliation, policy coordination, and scholarly inquiry, linking post-conflict governance to broader debates over global order and Africa’s shifting geopolitical position. Taken together, these aesthetic, political, and institutional formations do not resolve the contradictions of the present so much as render them legible, pointing to a landscape in which the terms of Black internationalism must be reimagined beyond the frameworks that once gave it coherence.

Rather than sorting actors into heroes and villains or dismissing particular political formations in contemporary Africa—such as its proliferating transregional politics, growing continental institutions, or forms of involvement in global affairs—as potentially inauthentic co-optations that do not live up to the virtuous ideals of the past, a Pan-African geopolitics makes sense of how imaginaries of global Black solidarity have been mobilized to structure political, diplomatic, and ideological relationships across Africa and its diaspora. It reveals how the utopian rhetoric of global unity generates its own potential set of obligations, such as the question of international protection and intervention that took shape most recently in the deployment of Kenyan military police to Haiti. We must be able to make sense of how Black Internationalist principles of solidarity come to appear, for example, in the remarks of African and Caribbean ministers of foreign affairs even as such moments collide with both the financial footprint of U.S. empire and the more complex and internally differentiated realities of race and racism on the ground. The task, then, is to imagine a Black Internationalism capable of taking African interests seriously—one that may be tethered to an anchor of venerable moments and figures but is also able to be attentive to the institutional and geopolitical terrain that now shapes Pan-African possibility.