C. L. R. James left England in 1938, traveling first to the United States, then to Mexico to visit the exiled Leon Trotsky, then back to the United States, where he would reside for the next decade and a half. During six productive years in London, James had emerged as a leading figure in the city’s burgeoning black radical community and a leading theorist in the project of aligning Marxist praxis to the pan-African, anticolonial, and race-conscious sensibilities of black radicalism—to the project of shifting the focus of world socialist revolution from the European proletariat to occupied Africa. James, along with George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Ras Makonnen, and others, was the bearer of an intellectual tradition that had held organized Marxism and black internationalism in productive tension since the inauguration of the Third International in 1919. In 1945, when he met a young African student named Kwame Nkrumah, then preparing to sail for London, James would bequeath this tradition to a new generation. In The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domongo Revolution (1938), his classic account of the Haitian Revolution, James had argued that the antislavery writings of the Abbé Raynal sparked the imagination of the revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture as a young man. Looking forward, he suggested that African liberation would likewise be kindled by a stray pamphlet falling into the right hands, this time perhaps written by Lenin or Trotsky. But when Nkrumah—the future leader of independent Ghana and of an incipient continental Pan-Africanism movement—arrived in London, he was welcomed by Padmore and handed not Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, or Engels, but rather a copy of The Black Jacobins.

Minkah Makalani narrates this story near the end of his important and groundbreaking new book, In the Cause of Freedom. Makalani is not interested in reigniting debates about the relative influence of the Comintern in black radicalism and organizing in the United States and elsewhere, nor is he especially burdened by the old project of demonstrating black agency in Comintern policymaking and Communist organizing on the ground. Rather, he demonstrates that black radical internationalism preceded the Russian Revolution, encouraged—along with its Asian analogue—international Communism in new theoretical directions during the 1920s, and eventually outgrew the limitations of the Comintern as an organizational, discursive, and liberatory vessel in the 1930s. By the Second World War, with the Soviet Union locked in a strategic embrace with the great colonial powers, then the Nazis, then the colonial powers again, black radical internationalism represented the vanguard of Marxist internationalism. Kwame Nkrumah found his voice in Marxism, but he did so via C. L. R. James, George Padmore, the Haitian Revolution, and The Black Jacobins.

For Makalani this narrative requires a “repositioning” of the evidence, a willingness to think beyond the prevailing “archive of black Marxism,” and a telling of a story about black radicalism between the world wars “without taking organized Marxism as the principal or originary frame” (11–12). This does not mean an endorsement of Cedric Robinson’s pioneering effort (Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 1983) to position black Marxism outside of and in opposition to traditions of European Marxism. Makalani is more comfortable with Anthony Bogues’s notion of the “black heretic” (Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals, 2003), which acknowledges the influence of Western radical theory on black Marxists even as it challenges what is seen as its limited vision when it came to the nonwhite and colonial world. What it does mean is a rethinking of the framework of the relationship between Communist internationalism and black internationalism. In Makalani’s telling the Comintern offered less a theoretical infrastructure for black radicalism and more a physical one—new resources, new contacts, and new opportunities to pursue projects that were simultaneously parallel to and theoretically heretical to the designs of the Third International in general and national Communist parties in particular. Black radicals in the United States, clustered around Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood, turned to the Comintern when outlets for diasporic political expression—Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congress, Kelly Miller’s Sanhedrin All-Race Conference—proved undesirable or unnavigable. This collaboration helped generate connections and contacts between black workers and activists throughout the African diaspora, in Europe, the United States, Africa, and the greater Caribbean. But even amidst modest organizational successes, particularly the constitution of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), and even as they were inspired by the Comintern’s class-based internationalism, black radicals felt constrained by the rigors of party orthodoxy, by the chauvinism of European and American Communists, and by persistent inattention to theorizing race consciousness. George Padmore’s famous resignation from international Communism, far from a change of heart on Padmore’s part, reflected a new fissure in a long and rocky relationship that was in equal parts productive and volatile.

In the Cause of Freedom is crackling with insight; this is intellectual history at its best. It demonstrates the promise of transnational history in unmooring people and social movements from geographical, historiographical, and discursive contexts that often fail to contain their field of vision, and as a result have led scholars to a set of incomplete or misleading conclusions. In doing this Makalani both demonstrates the value of “diaspora” as an analytic framework and illustrates its limitations. By building on Brent Hayes Edwards’s formulation of “intercolonial internationalism” (The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 2003) and particularly by exploring the role of Asian radicals in opening a space for black radicalism in organized Communism, Makalani joins a number of recent scholars in suggesting the resonance of pan-colored or pan-colonial alliances in the twentieth century. As Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley suggested in this journal nearly fifteen years ago (“Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” ASR 43 [1], 2000), black internationalism has frequently been generated by diasporic imagination and collaborations, but not always. Makalani’s sensitive reading of the interlocking relationships among black diasporic, Asian, and European radicalisms is an important reminder of this.

Published two years after In the Cause of Freedom, Hakim Adi’s Pan-Africanism and Communism suffers from bad timing. In the shadow of Makalani’s lightning bolt of an intervention, Adi’s text may strike some readers as an anachronism, an attempt to litigate old battle lines in Cold War historiography that now seem somewhat stale. Adi is less interested in theoretical innovation than in hard-earned accuracy; he wants readers to know precisely how the Comintern viewed and approached the “Negro Question,” and he wants to counter misperceptions about the understudied Comintern-directed ITUCNW by offering a comprehensive account of the organization’s activities. Adi’s narrative, grounded in an impressively thorough review of the Comintern archives in Moscow, carefully reconstructs the efforts of the Third International in general, and the ITUCNW in particular, to mobilize black workers in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. The first part of the book offers an overview of the institutional debates surrounding the “Negro Question” in elite Communist circles, from the founding of the Third International to efforts to restructure and reconstitute the ITUCNW following George Padmore’s acrimonious departure as director. Adi is more generous than Makalani in crediting the Third International’s approach to the “colonial and national question” in generating work among peoples of African descent, but he also credits African American, Afro-Caribbean, and African radicals for both pushing the Comintern to recognize the value of this organizing and to confront its endemic problem with “white chauvinism,” particularly within the national parties of South Africa, Europe, and the United States. Part 2 of the book comprises a series of case studies that chart the work of the Comintern and the ITUCNW in France, Britain, the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Africa.

Adi’s meticulous combing of the Comintern records provides powerful and definitive evidence of his central claims. The reader learns that the Comintern sustained a flexible approach to the race problem during the interwar era; that the Comintern did not (or could not) enforce the type of strict discipline on national parties once imagined; and that the Comintern’s emphasis on pan-Africanist approaches—under the rubric of class struggle—prevailed for many years. Pan-Africanism and Communism makes it perfectly clear that the effort to spread the Third International’s message to peoples of African descent was extensive and sustained, and that black activists fought doggedly, against difficult odds, to draw black recruits and organizations into the movement and to place anticolonial organizing front and center within international Communism.

But there are also limits to Adi’s approach. For one, as Adi himself acknowledges, the official sources amplify the voices of privileged male activists at the expense of black women radicals, proffering a narrative arc that is particularly problematic in light of the recent work by Erik McDuffie on African American women Communists (see, e.g., Sojourning for Freedon: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, Duke University Press, 2011). Another problem is the broader field of vision projected by the archive. Even if we can see in Comintern correspondence just how widely Communist influence was carried to Africa and elsewhere, we gain little understanding of how deeply it penetrated or what happened in those places where it traveled. The reader learns, for example, of Communist support for the strike in Bathurst led by the Gambian trade union leader E. F. Small, and is presented with Small’s views on the “Negro Question,” but learns little about the strike, or its effects, or about Gambia in general. The reader learns that the Federation of Non-European Trade Unions organized several strikes in South Africa, but little else. The result is a narrative seemingly driven more by the archive than by the author, more by abstract policy debates and thin connections of correspondence than by thick engagements of organizing and politics on the ground.

This is not to say that Pan-Africanism and Communism deserves a place in the dustbin of historiography. If Makalani has given future scholars a rich theoretical infrastructure with which to engage, Adi’s close reading of the Moscow archives has bequeathed a detailed roadmap for specialists interested in prying open the myriad stories toward which Pan-Africanism and Communism gestures. As a scholar of global Garveyism, I was amazed to discover just how useful the Comintern archives will be for future scholars of black nationalism in general and Garveyism in particular. For although both Makalani and Adi are problematically dismissive of the importance of Garveyism during the interwar years, what emerges again and again in the correspondence of Communist organizers is the problem of Garveyism’s enduring appeal among potential recruits all over the world. If the Pan-Africanism expressed at the Manchester Conference in 1945 bore the imprint of the black radical tradition, the pan-Africanism of the interwar years was dominated by the vision aligned with Marcus Garvey. It was in the transition from pan-Africanism, an ideological tradition with roots in the eighteenth century, to Pan-Africanism, the post–World War II political project, that Makalani’s subjects left their mark. One is left wondering how the interwar period might be rewritten if the “archive of black internationalism” is expanded to engage critically with the era’s most influential mass politics.