The Discourses of Black Power, the Imagined Community of Blackness, and Transnational Connections

This paper will outline and explore the intellectual foundation of Black Power from a transnational perspective, focused on Black Power in the Anglo–Caribbean (specifically Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, and Bermuda), the UK, and the US. This paper will be an intellectual history of the Black Power movement, seeking to understand and explore both the perspective of Black Power intellectuals and activists alongside rank-and-file members of Black Power organisations to provide an intellectual history of the movement that does not discount or ignore the lived experiences of members. 

It will begin by situating the Black Power movement into the wider streams of Black Radical history, from slave revolts in the Caribbean to the New Negro Movement and the Négritude, key to understanding the intellectual currents of Black Power is understanding its intellectual foundation and writing it into histories of Black radicalism. It will then explore the different branches of intellectual development of the Black Power Movement, some spearheaded by national and transnational concerns and some specific to certain activists or organisations, providing an examination of the key intellectual developments of Black Power as well as examining the ideological links and discourses between mainstream Black Power politics and Black feminism, both within Black Power organisations and independent Black Feminist Organisations.

This paper, inspired by my larger DPhil project, is focused on writing the Black Power movement beyond the lens of a social-historical approach to contribute a more well-rounded approach to understanding the intellectual discourses and developments of Black Power specifically and Black radical histories in general which are neglected in traditional intellectual historiography. However, key to this paper and my work is the fact that Black Power was a ‘lived’ revolutionary movement that is not to be ignored and the lived experiences of members of Black Power groups and activists who focused on the immediate needs articulated through Black Power politics illuminate a pivotal aspect of Black Power intellectual development. As such It will seek to write a ‘lived–in’ intellectual history by drawing on archival resources and already recorded oral histories of members of Black Power groups along with Black Power intellectuals to explore and provide a discussion of the
intellectual branches of the Black Power Movement.

Alisha Odoi-Smith is a second-year history DPhil at the University of Oxford, funded by the Black Academic Futures scholarship, whose thesis explores how Black Power imagined and created forms of Black Identity through intellectual and cultural production. Alisha’s more general area is a focus on histories of empire, race, and radicalism. Before undertaking her DPhil, Alisha undertook an MPhil in African Studies (2020-2022) at the University of Cambridge, majoring in history with a thesis focusing on Black British identity and links with African communities. Before this, Alisha completed an undergraduate degree in History at the University of Exeter (2017 – 2020), with a thesis focused on Black identity in Britain from 1967-1985.

- this seminar is free to attend but booking in advance is required.