INTERNATIONALIZING THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL: THE AFRICAN BLOOD BROTHERHOOD, ASIAN RADICALS, AND RACE, 1919-1922

What has gone unremarked in histories of African Americans in communist movements is how Asian radicals, in challenging the privileged position accorded white workers by the Comintern, opened up the Third International so that black radicals might see it as a vehicle for Pan-African liberation. Unlike many on the left who tended to see race only within the precincts of North America, ABB (African Blood Brotherhood) radicals spent considerable time thinking and writing about the global dimensions of race--in Africa, Asia, and South America--seeing it, in short, as a component of colonialism. Black radicals stepped into the theoretical breach opened by Asian radicals to raise the importance of race in international communist thought, to outline a vision of the coherence of African diasporic and Asian liberation struggles, and to push internationalism beyond Europe to address oppressed racial groups and colonized peoples. Here, Makalani attends to the resonances in black and Asian radical thought to consider how they elaborated parallel visions of a world proletarian revolution that internationalized the Third International.