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We hope this summer 2012 edition of Radical Black Reading can offer some respite from the hurly burly of an increasingly anti-Black World. High up on our list of summer reads is a classic from CLR James, one of The Public Archive’s spiritual mentors. A History of Pan-African Revolt, James’ pioneering account of global Black resistance against colonialism and racism, returns to print this summer. Originally published during a period of activity when James somehow managed to pen The Black Jacobins while translating Boris Souvarine’s biography of Josef Stalin, A History of Pan-African Revolt has been rediscovered, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley notes in its introduction, by successive generations of Black intellectuals and activists. It was published as a FACT monograph in 1938, by Drum & Spear in 1969, by Charles H. Kerr in 1995, and now by Oakland, California’s PM Press. For his part, Kelley has followed up on his astounding biography of Thelonius Monk with a volume that implicitly nods to the transnational politics evoked by James. In Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard), Kelley maps the sonic interchange between jazz and African liberation in the music and thought of pianist Randy Weston, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, drummer Guy Warren, and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin.

The history of Black Atlantic crossings and African internationalism is also a theme in a crop of recent books, many of which also interrogate the contemporary history of globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Cheryl Higashida’s Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (Illinois) examines how writers including Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde grappled with the literary norms of literary forms while forging a global political community. Anthropologist Jemima Pierre’s highly anticipated The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago) promises to revise the status of Africa within Black Atlantic discourses while turning the calcified tradition of Africanist anthropology on its head.”

READ The whole amazing post here: http://thepublicarchive.com/?p=3226

(image: Alfred and Bernice Ligon own the Aquarian Book Shop, probably the oldest black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles)