Abstract This article examines anti-colonialism and Third World solidarities in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. It does so through a study of the Black Liberation Front (BLF), a Black Power group formed in London in 1971. The BLF saw themselves as part of a global Third World solidarity, and, as activists in Britain, identified their location as ‘inside the belly of the monster’. They understood racism and colonialism as global phenomena, and offered material support to anti-colonial movements across the world, especially in Africa. The prevailing historiography of Black activism in post-war Britain foregrounds domestic anti-racism. Based on a reading of the BLF’s publications, alongside subsequent memoirs by and interviews with former BLF members, this article argues for Black activism in Britain to be viewed through a more global lens. Moreover, it shows how a deeper understanding of transnational anti-colonialism reconfigures our understanding of the domestic politics of race. Historians of decolonization must attend to how twentieth-century geographies of race and migration created the conditions for solidarities that do not fit within a metropole–colony binary.

ABSTRACT The revanchist return of capital to U.S. cities has evolved to speculative revanchism at the federal level, with billionaires from the technology, real estate, and finance sectors (key drivers of urban revanchism) converging in authoritarian governance. Speculative revanchism – the rage to use futuristic technologies and discourses to revive the economic and ideological values of the past (the ghosts of Manifest Destiny and the Lost Cause) – arises from the centuries-old struggle between racial capitalism and liberatory movements. Marxist urban studies provide critical insights about capitalist geographies, yet they inadequately frame how racial struggles influence spatial production. In the United States, urban revanchism has been largely a reaction to the fifteen historical Black urban regimes (HBURs), which emerged from the clash between the segregationist racial order and the Black Power movement. Detroit, an old industrial center, and Oakland, a rising tech hub near Silicon Valley, represent opposite poles of the HBURs, yet their Black residents face similar structural challenges as they “wage love” to cultivate a liberating and life-sustaining place for themselves on earth. To develop a strategic understanding of the fight against speculative revanchism, it is useful to study these two cities.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s is a point in the cultural and political transformation of the African American literary tradition. The movement, which emerged in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, not only attempted to redefine the relationship between art and politics but it was also attempted to redefine the black identity by radically engaging the aesthetic practices. Historians like Yusef ‛M. Akbar and McCree have suggested that such a transition was a deliberate move towards a praxis that preempted the political action of black poets, writers, and visual artists as a coherent way of dissent. Poetry especially was the burning ground where the issue of race, maleness, cultural memory and political awareness were smelt into resistance. A kind of so-called political poetics was strategically written into the poetically rhetoric of the time, i.e. the works of Amiri Baraka, Lucille Lynn, etc., which already predetermined the experience of the community, black solidarity, and the recovery of the historical narrative. Here, the structure and the content of verse was employed in a selective way to question and challenge systems of oppression but at the same time producing possible eschatological visions of a free self. By redefining Harlem and other urbanized areas, which could be readily characterized by the discourse of violence and confinement, surveillance, etc., the movement poets captured not only the reality of the racial oppression but also the potential of group empowerment. Their choice to have the urban experience foregrounded allowed the poets to outline contexts that were materialistically repressive as they were symbolically subversive to locate urbanity-as-such as a space of political struggle and cultural reinterpretation. This paper argues that the poetry of the Black Arts Movement, especially when gathered in book form as in Black Fire, is a technique to transform marginalization in the city into a vessel of cultural and political enlightenment. It illustrates that the aesthetic cultures of resistance, masculinity and collective memory exist in a collaborative manner to recover the black identity which in turn promotes the ideological premises of Black Power. In this manner, the poetics of defiance shared by the movement resonate even now, in the modern movement of racial justice, which serves as a temporal link between the struggle of the past and the modern-day movement.

Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit

George Jackson (1941–1971) was an African American prison-made revolutionary and a key intellectual in the Black Power Movement. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence of one year to life inside California’s maximum-security prisons, where he was killed by a tower guard. His revolutionary knowledge exited the prison space through his letters and reached the wider public when published in 1970 as Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. This paper proposes a reading that centralizes epistolarity, embarking from the hypothesis that Soledad Brother is a series of multidirectional pedagogical encounters during which knowledge emerges and develops in conversation with multiple addressees and in relation to multiple moments in Jackson’s ongoing prison time. The first section examines Jackson’s parole board hearings as nodal points in his indeterminate incarceration and as learning occasions of difficult knowledge. The second section charts three praxes of allyship that can be drawn from the epistolary confrontations between Jackson and the intended recipients of his letters. The coda engages with the politics of publication and reception implicated in Soledad Brother, situating the publication within the Black print culture of the Long Sixties and highlighting the response of its multiple reading publics.

Black Power Naps is a multidisciplinary project that reclaims rest as a radical act of resistance against systemic inequities. Initiated in 2015 as a workshop for Black culture workers, it has evolved into a public conversation, research initiative and design proposal aimed at addressing the Sleep Gap–a disparity rooted in the historical exploitation of enslaved peoples and perpetuated by contemporary systems. The project counters three key tools of oppression: chromophobia, the colonial fear of colour that erases Afro-diasporic aesthetics; hostile architecture, urban planning designed to exclude marginalized communities; and sonic terror, the use of noise pollution to destabilise underprivileged neighbourhoods. Through vibrant installations, soundscapes and architectural interventions, Black Power Naps creates spaces that celebrate Black joy and healing. By reframing rest as reparations and collective care, it challenges the structural forces that deny rest to the underprivileged, offering a vision deeply rooted in Black radical traditions. a painting, each stroke scaled our project into a larger mission of creating awareness around disparities in rest and sleep. After studying the Sleep Gap and the history of the sleep deprivation of enslaved peoples, we decided to shape the project to combat three prominent tools used in Western societies to interrupt the human circadian rhythms of underprivileged communities.

Black Power Naps is a sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power. Departing from historical records that show that deliberate fragmentation of restorative sleep patterns were used to subjugate and extract labour from enslaved people, we have realised that this extraction has not stopped, it has only morphed. A state of constant fatigue is still used to break our will. This ‘sleep gap’ shows that there are front lines in our bedrooms as well as in the streets: deficit of sleep and lack of free time for some is the building block of the ‘free world.’ After learning who benefits most from restful sleep and down time, we are creating interactive surfaces for a playful approach to investigate and practise deliberate energetic repair.

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of education in fueling Black American Muslims’ efforts to achieve self-determination. It focuses on the Dar-ul-Islam Movement, a community that was active from 1962 to 1983 and, before 1975, comprised the largest national network of Black Sunni Muslims in the US. I argue that the movement’s educational efforts—which included independent schools as well as programs for youth and adults—were key to actualizing its vision of carving out sacred urban geographies where they could live freely without interference from the state. The Dar’s praxis challenges scholarship that silos Black and Muslim intellectual discourses, as well as those that separate religious ideologies from political visions. Instead, through a focus on the movement’s educational efforts during the Black Power era, I show how the Dar fused theological, moral, material, and sociopolitical concerns to actualize collective liberation for Black Muslims in the urban US.

It is well known that the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) used The Second Sex as a consciousness-raising text. This article, however, attempts to account for another related use that this text had for the WLM: its way of critiquing Marxism while maintaining support for its basic principles. The article begins by placing the WLM in New York City in its historical context of critical indebtedness to Marxist New Left movements and movements for Black Power. It then highlights three interrelated critiques levelled against those movements by the WLM: that they have the wrong object of study; that socialism fails to alter the structure of the family and so fails to liberate women; and that women on the organized Left have only ever been organized as workers, not as women. I suggest that all three of these critiques of Marxism were, at least in part, derived from readings of The Second Sex.

In 2019, California became the first state to pass the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act, a legislative initiative created to combat race-based hair discrimination in the United States. Race-based hair discrimination in the United States is rooted in the degradation of the Black phenotype during the transatlantic slave trade. In the face of this, Black Americans have made efforts to reclaim Black power and uplift Black beauty through the Black Power Movement, and more recently through a second wave natural hair movement. Despite the pivotal role civil rights protections, like those enacted through the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, and 1964, have played in the race-discrimination landscape, existing discrimination law falls short in remedying race-based hair discrimination. Judicial rulings, particularly that in EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, have reinforced the concept that natural Black hairstyles are not an immutable trait, allowing employers and public institutions to enforce discriminatory grooming policies that disproportionately impact Black individuals. The CROWN Act has the potential to rectify the shortcomings of existing discrimination law by providing Black people with a legal remedy against race-based hair discrimination. This Note argues that Congress should enact a federal CROWN Act that explicitly frames natural Black hairstyling as a flexible carve-out immutable trait akin to presently established immutable traits, such as skin color. This would remedy the gap existing anti-discrimination laws have left and firmly establish race-based hair discrimination as a form of racial bias under federal law.

Orthodontists frequently use elastomeric chains for space closure and incisor retraction, though these chains are prone to force degradation and permanent deformation over time. Initially introduced in the early 20th century, elastic power chains became more widely adopted in orthodontic practice in the 1960s due to industrial advancements. There are three main types of elastomeric chains: closed (continuous), open (short), and long (broad), available in various colors such as clear and black. Elastomeric chains generate forces for several orthodontic applications, including traction of impacted teeth, space closure, midline correction, retraction of canines and incisors post-extraction, tooth leveling and alignment, mesial displacement in posterior regions, and space closure. However, therapeutic control challenges arise as the force exerted by these chains diminishes over time, with studies indicating a reduction of 50%–75% in the first 24 hours, followed by continued exponential decay.OBJECTIVES:This study aimed to analyze the rate of force decay in closed and open power chains, both black and transparent, from four orthodontic manufacturers (American Orthodontics®, Ortho Technology®, Ormco®, and Orthometric®). Additionally, we sought to determine any significant differences among brands and colors that could influence the elastics’ clinical effectiveness.MATERIALS AND METHODS:A total of 48 power chain samples were tested for force decay by using a universal orthodontic force gauge. The chains, stretched to 90 mm (twice their original length), were measured at 0 hours, 24 hours, 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, and 5 weeks. The samples were stored in artificial saliva within a laboratory water bath at a constant 37°C to simulate the oral environment. Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) test was applied to assess differences between brands, colors, types (closed or open), and time intervals.RESULTS:The study revealed significant differences in force decay among the various orthodontic power chains over the 5-week evaluation period. American Orthodontics® demonstrated the highest reduction in force, with a decay of 73.42% by week 5, while Ormco® exhibited the least decay at 48.17%. The black power chains of American Orthodontics® and Ortho Technology® showed superior initial force retention compared to their clear power chains counterparts, although all tested materials experienced substantial force decay. Closed power chains consistently retained higher forces than open ones across all brands, highlighting their potential advantage in clinical applications requiring optimal force delivery.DISCUSSION:The significant differences in decay patterns suggest that clinicians should consider using Ormco® and Orthometric® for prolonged applications due to its relative stability, while the black power chains of American Orthodontics® and Ortho Technology® may be more suitable for cases requiring immediate, high forces. Additionally, the consistent superiority of closed power chains in force retention emphasizes their potential advantages in optimizing tooth movement, reinforcing the need for orthodontists to align material choices with specific clinical objectives.CONCLUSION:This study highlights the significant variability in force decay among different orthodontic power chains, emphasizing the necessity for careful material selection based on both initial strength and long-term performance. The findings advocate for tailored approaches to enhance treatment efficacy and patient outcomes in orthodontic care.

Washington State Rising: Black Power on Campus in the Pacific Northwest

Demonstrating that Richard Wright anticipates the theory of totalitarianism famously outlined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this article argues that, for both thinkers, fascism offers a compensatory “binding” mechanism by which the lonely, worldless moderns can locate the principle that since Aristotle has been called “the common good” (to koinon agathon). In his later work, including Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954) and unpublished writings, Wright expands his account of fascism’s lure onto the decolonizing world. For him, decolonization offers at once an opportunity for unforeseen creation and fascism’s resurgence in the newly recognized nations. The urgency in his political philosophy—an urgency shared with our contemporary world—concerns the need to guarantee that the new world put together from modernity’s “shattered remains” not be the fiend of fascism but a monster of a different constitution. As such, Wright can be understood as a thinker of creation.

ABSTRACT The Black Power Movement became synonymous with Black pride and Black machoism. Black women resisted patriarchal discussions by highlighting the multi-layered discrimination through Black feminism and prison abolition. Black Panther Party women utilized the organization’s newspaper, The Black Panther, to create content around female political prisoners to elevate the experiences and voices outside of Black men. The newspaper covered poor, criminalized Black people outside of the “traditional” Black press’ middle-class respectability. At the same time, they expanded the debate on anti-Black state-sanctioned violence and oppression to include gender and class. This study contributes to the previous scholarship on Black women’s media activism as it uncovers inequalities in the criminal justice system.

ABSTRACT In May 1974, around 500 ‘Ugandan Asian’ workers walked out of Leicester’s Imperial Typewriters factory. For the recently formed Race Today Collective (RTC), which published the radical journal Race Today, the dispute represented an opportunity to put into practice its theoretical and practical commitments to supporting autonomous black workers’ struggles. Tracing the origins of the Collective in the British Black Power Movement, this paper examines the role that the RTC played in the Imperial Typewriters strike, the significance of Race Today in archiving the events of the strike and the voices of the workers, and how the Collective’s understanding of political blackness shaped the narrative of the Imperial strike developed in the pages of Race Today. Through tracing the absences and elisions in Race Today’s narrative, we can better understand the tensions, fractures and possibilities that animated the Imperial Typewriters strike and the black workers’ struggle.

The present study aims to investigate the effects of structural racism and colonial heritage on the subjective constitution of the Black population in Brazil. Through this investigation, the goal was to foster knowledge that contributes to the possibility of an epistemological appropriation allowing Black individuals to construct and assume a discourse about themselves, thus fostering the power of Blackness. To this end, a literature review method was employed, focusing on works that engage with the issue in question. Taking Neusa Santos’s epistemic legacy as a central reference, historical, ethical, and political marks shaping the emotionality and self-esteem of Black Brazilian women were analyzed, highlighting a scenario in which discourse is rooted in the tension between the Self and an unattainable and distressing White Ideal. In this context, the colonial discourse and its role in producing suffering in a specific social group are examined, imposing a position of "non-place" or asymmetric difference, reinforcing a structure that emphasizes white supremacy and sustaining a social dynamic in which burdens are imposed on many while benefits are reserved for others.

From Self-Determination to Privatization (and Back Again): Water and Post–Black Power Politics in Newark, New Jersey

This research examines the recent work of one Black Student Union (BSU) from 2019 to 2023 at a large public university in California. The first ever Black Student Union, founded in 1966 at San Francisco State College, is immortalized for transforming higher education nationwide. Their organizing, courage, and struggle led to the creation of hundreds of Black Studies and other Ethnic Studies departments and programs and inspired the formation of more than 1,000 BSUs. Notably, the Black Student Union is the only thriving organization that has come out of the Black Power era that still exists. Decades later, understanding the role and impact of present-day Black Student Unions matters. Examining official documents, social media posts, and semi-structured interviews with (15) recent BSU members, (3) faculty, (3) staff, and (2) administrators reveal that the Black Student Union fought for and inspired significant institutional changes on campus and embody the spirit of Black Power. These findings offer important lessons for marginalized groups seeking structural change and for universities on how to support Black students.

ABSTRACT Navigating a thorny landscape of racism and sexism, Black women have been influential in numerous social movements. Defined by the eras in which they lived, Black women often faced sexism in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. At the same time, they faced racism and exclusion from the predominantly white feminist movement. Confronting the twin issues of racism and sexism, this work charts the struggles of Black female activists. Creating their own spaces, theorists like Alice Walker and Kimberlé Crenshaw espoused concepts like womanism and intersectionality to stress the importance of race and gender. With the rise of Black Lives Matter created by three Black women, this work illustrates the role(s) of Black female activism in the modern era. Using the tools of social media and digital organizing, this work also shows the influence of Black feminism in the growth of modern movements such as #metoo and #sayhername.

V. S. Naipaul’s 1975 novel Guerrillas is the earliest example of Caribbean fiction that purports to provide a realistic depiction of Trinidad’s brief but historically significant Black Power movement. Naipaul was an Indo-Trinidadian expatriate who immigrated to the U.K. in 1950 and remained there until his death in 2018. He was famously Anglophilic; and given his notorious insistence that culturally the West Indies are derivative, not creative, it is unsurprising that Naipaul depicts Black Power as an empty form that Trinidad and Great Britain import to their detriment from the U.S. In its fictionalization of the story of a real-life figure on the periphery of Black Power, Guerrillas presents Black Power’s presence in Trinidad and the UK as a failure and a sham. My article traces Naipaul’s transformation of what was originally a journalistic account into his novel Guerrillas in order to highlight the tendentiousness of his representation of Trinidadian Black Power. The plot of the novel repurposes the crux of Naipaul’s essay “The Killings in Trinidad” in which he reports how a Trinidadian Black Power poseur known as “Michael X” conspired in the January 1972 murder of a white woman named Gale Ann Benson. Crucial to Naipaul’s dismissal of Black Power as a derivative fiction, this article argues, is the fraudulent Michael X, himself a mimic man par excellence in his embodiment of Black Power as an empty and parodic form devoid of original content. I demonstrate how Naipaul’s marginalization of Caribbean Black Power depends on formal mimicry and on his selection of this marginal player/mimic man as representative of the movement in Trinidad.