Liberated Territory: Anti-Colonial Marxism, the Black Panthers, and the Struggle for Palestine
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, militant anti-colonial Marxist organizations across the world struggled for no less than the total transformation of society. These movements, particularly in the settler colonial contexts of Palestine, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States sought to simultaneously overthrow local settler power structures and the global conditions of imperialism. These local and global modes of domination could not be separated: settler colonial exploitation and elimination was only made possible within the global contours of US-led imperialism. Using extensive archival sources, this talk excavates how the political and intellectual practice of the Black Panthers, understood as an anti-colonial Marxist organization embedded in the radical lineages of Black communism, reflected this dual struggle through its efforts to transform the nation-states of the world into communal 'liberated territories'. Yet, our current global political moment requires more than just historical reconstruction. Given the urgency of Palestinian liberation and Zionism's strategic and ideological centrality in US-led imperialism, a global anti-colonial praxis must not only reconsider anti-colonial Marxism but actively utilize histories such as that of the Black Panthers. These histories are essential for the development of a political praxis that can oppose specific settler contexts such as the US and Palestine as well as the larger imperial framework in which settler colonialism thrives.
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