Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches

This article provides some theoretical sketches of the epistemological and intellectual impact of the Cold War on African Diaspora Theory. Starting in the 1950s, anticommunism/antiradicalism overwrote and built upon extant technologies of antiblackness that dispossess, subordinate, and marginalize the majority of African descendants in the United States and in the Global South. While concessions were made to a certain group of Blacks—particularly Cold War Liberals in the United States and Developmentalists in the Global South—these exceptions were directly contingent upon the repression of labor, radicalism, and any forms of mobilization that challenged the pedagogy of the Cold War state. Those who received entitlements from the dominant regime became complicit with the deployment of violence against those they were complicit in “niggerizing.” As a result, the Black radical tradition has been subsumed in African Diaspora Theory, rendering the latter insufficient for critical engagement with the material conditions of the Black subaltern.