Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
ICM Lecture Series
RUSSELL RICKFORD
Associate Professor, History, Cornell University
ABSTRACT
In the 1970s an array of African American progressives launched grassroots campaigns to demonstrate solidarity with armed liberation struggles against European colonialism and white minority rule in Southern Africa. The Pan African solidarity movement was seen as a means of hastening the decline of Western imperialism, bolstering African self-determination, and re-energizing the black liberation struggle in the U.S. But violent internal divisions within the Angolan struggle complicated African American attempts to serve as comrades to Third World revolutionaries. Debates over which of Angola's rival guerrilla movements deserved African American support led to bitter feuds on the black left. The Angolan affair exposed critical questions about the nature of revolution, the intersection of race and class, and the relationship of black Americans to other oppressed people around the world.
BIO
Russell Rickford is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University and the author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016), which received the 2016 Hooks Institute National Book Award and the 2017 OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. He specializes in African-American political culture after World War Two, the Black Radical Tradition, and transnational social movements. He is currently working on a book about African-American radicalism and Guyana in the 1970s. Rickford’s scholarly articles have appeared in Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Souls, New Labor Review, and other publications. His popular writing has appeared in publications such as In These Times and Counterpunch. He also writes about racial and social justice for the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog and other sites.
This event is free and open to the public. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.
