The Anticolonial Front

Reviews / Votes

'Munro portrays legendary anti-colonialists in an African-American political geography. By interrogating a gestalt of the Cold War, anti-fascism, and the long Civil Rights Movement, he posits a broad and worldly framework for understanding later twentieth-century American radicalism and racial-political culture, challenging parochialisms while revivifying leading actors and their powerful imaginaries.' Susan Dabney Pennybacker, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 'This exhaustively researched and insightful monograph shows how anti-colonial commitment constituted the horizons of African-American politics and intellectual life in the era between WWII and the civil rights upsurge of the 1960s. Illustrating the centrality of decolonization to the early Cold War period as a whole, John Munro demonstrates how African-American freedom struggles developed in conjunction with anti-colonial struggles around the world, advancing unprecedented, if now frequently forgotten, visions of political solidarity, diasporic affiliation, and intellectual collaboration across boundaries of nation and empire.' Nikhil Pal Singh, New York University 'John Munro provides a detailed study of how decolonization remained a persistent goal within the American left in spite of pressures from totalitarianism and imperialist orthodoxy in the 1930s to an emergent neoliberalism in the present day.' Brenda Gayle Plummer, University of Wisconsin, Madison