Circuits of Political Prophecy: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary

Abstract

This article examines transnational circulations of Afro-Jamaican and African-American political culture during 1960s and 1970s (roughly encompassing Jamaican independence, the transitions between Black Power and post–Black-Power era United States, and the year of escalating political violence, state destabilization, and economic collapse within the Jamaican state). Using an idea of sound as a marker of ideological projection and political possibility, this essay considers how forms of black political representation and national liberation move across geographic spaces and can represent intersecting yet divergent narratives of race and nation. In this context, I examine works and performances by Martin Luther King Jr. (during his 1965 speeches in Kingston) and Peter Tosh (during his 1978 One Love Peace Concert performance) as a way of framing how discourses of black liberation, postcolonial critique, Civil Rights and Black Power ideologies, and Rastafarian consciousness animate the efforts of both figures as they attempt to refashion ideas of black political possibility through and against the terms of modern emancipation and citizenship.