with racial groupings (white and black nationalisms) in an unsuccessful attempt to update the Bolsheviks’ theory of reactionary and progressive nationalisms. This analytic confusion spills over into the discussion of imperialism. Imperialism, specifically U.S. imperialism, is elevated in this text to the level of an almost autonomous subject, a commonplace in the radical political discourse of the period. But it leads to crucial blind spots with regards to the complexity of imperialism as a global phenomenon tied to the establishment and enforcement of capitalist relations via governmental policy, military force, but also modes of financial regulation and strategies of accumulation, with at times contradictory effects – particularly in the interplay between national and international, economic and political actors.

Second, and relatedly, the essay lacks a coherent or usable theory(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012 [1975]).

11.

↑

The allusion is to Stokely Carmichael’s comment “The only position for women in SNCC is prone” as reported by James Cone in Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies, ed. Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young (New York: Lexington Books, 1973), 414.

12.

↑

For an account of “dialectical humanism” in the work of James and Grace Lee Boggs see Stephen Ward, In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). See also Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), chapter 4, “‘Philosophy Must be Proletarian’: The Dialectical Humanism of James and Grace Lee Boggs,” 113-162.

Author of the article

Bill V. Mullen
is Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University. His