To the East, Blackward

Abstract

This chapter explores how the Muslim Third World influenced and informed Black radical politics and culture within the Muslim International. It examines how the anticolonial struggles in the Muslim Third World of Algeria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s not only shaped ideas about tactics and strategy, solidarity and political possibility, but they also informed ideas about film, literature, and cultural criticism within the Black Power imagination. By examining the influence of Frantz Fanon on the Algerian War of Independence and on the novel The Battle of Algiers, and Sam Greenlee and his novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, this chapter explores how the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Iraq became the literal and ideological backdrop for the redefinition of Black cultural practice, aesthetic developments, thematic concerns, and political orientations during the Black Power era.