Anti-apartheid transatlantic networks in the age of the civil rights struggle: Bloke Modisane in the United States

Abstract

In the Spring of 1963, London-based South African exiled artist and intellectual Bloke Modisane traveled to the United States on a co-sponsored visiting lecture tour of ten historically black colleges and universities in the South. A guest of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), Modisane’s lectures were a combination of intellectual, political, and performative registers which provided treatments on topics such as African rhythms in music and dance, South African literature, race and identity, and the anti-apartheid struggle. The institutions that he lectured in were actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s, positioning his visit at the center of the ongoing black freedom struggle in America. This article argues that Modisane was an active participant in anti-apartheid transatlantic networks and made a small but significant contribution to the cultural dimension of the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles as a public intellectual and artist. It focusses on the Southern college circuit of civil rights activism and aims to enrich our understanding of mid-century transatlantic pan-Africanism, cultural solidarity, and transnational linkages between black South African and African American intellectuals, especially realized in the literary rather than political-organizational locus of black transnationalism.