This special session considers the radical aesthetic and political experiments of African diaspora thinkers of the 1930s, as they navigated the currents of economic dispossession, rising fascism, and racialized violence. Although the 1930s was a decade in which anticolonial and antifascist agitation was at its peak, and reactionary and progressive forms of modernism flourished, we still need fuller literary histories of the era, especially those that go beyond the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance or the monumental works of such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright. All the speakers on the panel turn to lesser-known writers and texts to trouble existing histories of the period, and to speculate about the ongoing relevance of these dissident revolutionaries.

Nadia Nurhussein addresses what Captain Hugh Mulzac calls his “international political outlook,” developed in the late 1930s, as discussed in A Star to Steer By. Born on Union Island, Mulzac is introduced to segregation for the first time during a trip to the US when he is refused admission to a church at the age of 21. Later, in his 30s, he joins Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association as chief officer of the Black Star Line’s Yarmouth. However, Mulzac surprisingly claims that it is not until the age of 52 that he “began to develop a political philosophy” upon joining the National Maritime Union. Nurhussein examines Mulzac’s belief that an unsettled position at sea offers particular insight into geopolitics to maritime laborers that eludes those tasked with official roles in international relations. She explores the connections between Mulzac’s “international political outlook” – a deracinated, maritime, and cosmopolitan perspective – and his nautical career.

Yogita Goyal explores literary Garveyism by turning to the lost plays of Marcus Garvey, part of what theater critic Errol Hill has identified as “the revolutionary tradition in Black Drama” beginning with the 1823 play, William Henry Brown’s The Drama of King Shotoway. After being deported to Jamaica in 1927, Garvey built an open-air auditorium and stage at Edelweis Park in Kingston, mounting several spectacular dramatic pageants. Although no scripts have survived of Garvey’s plays, Goyal mines diverse archives of Pan-African print culture (including several reviews in journals like The Blackman) to reconstruct the work of these performances. Reading these lost plays alongside C.L.R. James’s recently recovered 1934 play, Toussaint Louverture and Una Marson’s 1938 play, Pocomania, Goyal locates the aesthetic dimensions of Garveyism that set it apart from dominant constructions of Black aesthetics to recover a more accurate history of radicalism in 1930s performance culture.

Brooks Hefner troubles reigning assumptions of George S. Schuyler as a satirist, based on his 1931 novel Black No More, by turning to his two revolutionary serials published as Black Empire. Situating Schuyler’s Black Empire serials within radical newspaper fiction—including serials published by Schuyler in the Pittsburgh Courier and by other writers in the Baltimore Afro-American—allows us to see the elements of earnest radical thought in Schuyler’s work, long before he abandoned leftist political principles in a march to the far right. Earlier Schuyler serials show him working out ideas for collective action and violent anticolonial resistance, and Schuyler’s essay “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” published just months after the second Black Empire serial concluded, has Schuyler advocating for action in a voice that resembles Dr. Henry Belsidus, the anticolonial leader of the Black Empire serials. Overemphasizing Schuyler’s satire risks blunting the truly radical dimension of these groundbreaking Afrofuturist texts.

Marina Bilbija examines a Lagos experiment in literary Pan-Africanism: Duse Mohamed Ali’s 1934 newspaper novel, Ere Roosevelt Came: A Record of the Adventures of the Man in the Cloak. Ali serialized this fantastical tale about a secret African American society fighting the KKK, Japan, and Soviet Russia in the Comet, a weekly magazine published in Lagos. Yet even though the novel’s main action takes place in the US, the global roots and consequences of its central conflict are highlighted at each turn. When the KKK join forces with foreign empires (Russia, and Japan) their transnational alliance destabilizes already fragile international relations, precipitating a new world war. Bilbija highlights the effects of the unevenness between the overly neat resolutions of the US plot and the irresolution of the global subplots. In their unevenness, she suggests, we can discern Ali’s critique of national solutions to global Black crises in the interwar period.

Following 4 papers no more than 12 minutes each, after a brief response by Simon Gikandi, the session will open to questions from the audience for at least 15 minutes.