Transnational Black Studies

Represents the best of the new of the very old tradition of transnational black studies From its inception, black studies has been transnational. Pioneering intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Nicolas Guillen, C. L. R. James, Oliver Cox, and Zora Neale Hurston shared a transnational sensibility shaped by the antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, however, much scholarship regarding blackness has been presented under the rubric of pan-Africanism or the African diaspora, terms that imply an inquiry solely into what it means to be of Africa. Increasingly, in an era of globalization and postcolonialism, such terms have become insufficient for capturing what it means to be black in a global context. Transnational black studies - an interdisciplinary arena of knowledge rooted in political struggle - has re-emerged to rectify this discursive insufficiency in contemporary scholarship.