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This chapter considers Gandhian politics in the era of non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements, 1920–35. The first section examines the impact of Gandhi and the politics and the effort of C.R. Das to devise an alternative strategy in the freedom movement, such as the Swaraj Party. The second section is on biplabi activities, which began long before Gandhism came on the scene and continued till the late 1930s. The revolutionary nationalists’ conflict with Gandhi’s non-violence was obvious. However, in course of the 1920s and 1930s many biplabis began to eschew terrorism and some joined the Congress and some others, the Left. The last section looks at Communism or variants of Socialism that begins to be influential in Bengal after the Russian Revolution. However, the Left was quite marginal at this time, and the movement is of interest chiefly because of its importance in future history.

This book closes with a critical assessment of the Dublin nationalist press in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. It discusses the challenges that faced the political activists, the concept of the unity of class and creed, the ideological battles between constitutional nationalism and revolutionary nationalism, the creation of a new national identity, and the emergence of socialist nationalism and cultural nationalism. All of this was to impact later on a changing world in the decades around the turn of the century; particularly borne in mind are the journalists whose words and actions were to inspire leading nationalists, notably Arthur Griffith, James Connolly and Patrick Pearse. Despite the overwhelming opposition of the British government, a persistent drive to achieve some form of Irish independence did not cease, and it is argued that the Dublin mid-nineteenth century newspapers and their writers took a leading role in laying the foundations to make this happen.

Chapter 2 turns to the political identity of the “Black Revolutionary Woman,” created by women in the Black Panther Party. The most widely recognized organization of the Black Power movement; the Panthers’ influence was pervasive, and shaped public perceptions of Black Power and empowerment both nationally and internationally. This chapter shows how Panther women used political artwork, speeches, and articles published in The Black Panther newspaper to create an evolving understanding of the female revolutionary and challenge male-centered interpretations of organizational ideology and black liberation. It also documents how Panther women’s intellectual production caused the Party to develop a more inclusive understanding of the black revolutionary activist.

The Young Lords applied to the U.S. context the worldview known as Third World socialism—the ideas and strategies for liberation that emerged during wars of decolonization in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria. These drew from Marxism, Maoism, Franz Fanon, and Lenin. In the US, radicals argued that racialized groups—including black Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans—were internal domestic colonies, politically and economically underdeveloped and dispossessed of their rights to self-determination. While Third World revolutions iconized peasant guerrillas, organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords identified the lumpenproletariat as the most revolutionary class in society. At a moment when economic restructuring and the flight of industries to the suburbs produced permanent unemployment and greater economic and racial segregation in the city, the activism and politics of grassroots radicals like the Young Lords reflected the distinctive social features of their urban environments. The Revolutionary Nationalism of urban radicals was tied to the vast relocation of white Americans from city to suburb. In this environment, the ideal of people of color fighting together with white Americans for change grew more and more difficult to enact as the daily lives of these populations grew further and further apart.

This chapter examines the 1960s movement to rename East Palo Alto, a small, predominantly black Northern California town, after Nairobi, the capital of the East African nation of Kenya. The campaign reflected the effort by many African Americans to rediscover their African cultural heritage and identity. The “African Restoration Movement” influenced local activists like Gertrude Wilks, founder of East Palo Alto’s Nairobi Day School and High School. A former integrationist, Wilks was drawn to black nationalist themes of black self-determination and African pride and awareness. However, her pragmatic brand of black nationalism contrasted with more masculinist and essentialist notions of African cultural identity and expression. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political limitations of Maulana Karenga’s influential visions of cultural nationalism and African reidentification.

In June 1929 the Mexican hierarchy reached a settlement, known as the arreglos, with the Mexican government that ended the armed uprising in Mexico. Initially, many Cristero supporters in the United States felt hopeful that peace would come at last, but sporadic religious uprisings of the 1930s, known collectively as the Second Cristiada or La Segunda, prolonged the violence in the Mexican countryside. This chapter describes the activities of the Cristero diaspora during the 1930s, as Mexican Cristero supporters in the United States continued to organize in opposition to the Mexican government. In contrast to the 1926–29 period, however, their approach became less militant. Instead, they focused on educational campaigns, publicity, political activism, and long-term organizational efforts. These activities helped to foster a religious nationalism that stood in stark contrast to the revolutionary nationalism promoted by the Mexican state.

This chapter examines how crises in Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic led Senator J. William Fulbright to question prevailing Cold War orthodoxy and to advocate an alternative internationalism rooted in self-determination. It argues that his support for self-determination in Latin America drew on his defense of southern autonomy within the United States and traces how he overlooked similarities between civil rights activism at home and revolutionary nationalism abroad. The chapter also describes how Fulbright antagonized President Lyndon Johnson and undermined the possibility of bettering relations with the Soviet Union during the 1960s.

This chapter examines the travels of naturalist William Bartram across the southern colonies where he recorded the native flora and fauna. Bartram intended to distinguish southern America as a temperate region that contributes to the health of the human faculties. It argues that Bartram’s travels yield an ecological conception of revolution that recalibrate theorizations of resistance in the eighteenth-century plantation zone, a space that is tropical and whose economy and political structures are shaped by the plantation form. His account of swamps and the transformation of the people who lived in them reveal a mode of action that pulls away from the public sphere as well as the revolutionary nationalism and modes of subjectivity. The chapter attempts to situate Bartram within a minoritarian enlightenment tradition attentive to tropical and subtropical regions’ disordering of the colonial projects that they also sustained by associating with Afro-American cultural productions.

This chapter presents the affective labor of subject formation to discuss Roderick Ferguson’s work Aberrations in Black. Ferguson describes the goals of a queer of color critique as “an epistemological intervention…[that] denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped to constitute Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism.” Queer of color analyses the “manifold intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation.” The remainder of the chapter examines how the racialized male body has been described as a historic plane of suffering.