Harlem’s Ethiopia: Literary Pan-Africanism and the Italian Invasion

Abstract

The victory and emancipation of the proletariat was very much the basis of communist ideology. But animating black radical thought was a profoundly felt ideology of liberation, which drew its main substance, and many of its imaginative tropes, from the past of slavery. The idea of black liberation predated the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, but in the years around the invasion we notice a clear reconfiguration of notions of race and nationality in the evolution of political consciousness among diasporic Africans, which was triggered by Mussolini’s act. What was most astounding to onlookers, political observers and elites was the unprecedented wave of black support for Ethiopia, which cut across location, nationality and class positioning; it was truly a global reaction. Among black intellectuals, we witness the emergence of figures like Padmore and James, who tried to write forms of transnational history based on the black political subject as actor of his own history and performer of his own liberation.