“Provocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures.”
—Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
“A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth’s critical assessment of certain variants of ‘decolonial studies’ and ‘Afro-Pessimism’ is welcome.”
—Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire
“This is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination.”
—Firoze Manji, co-editor, Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral
“In this rigorous debut, political theorist Okoth revisits the philosophies of mid-20th-century African revolutionaries….Activists and readers interested in leftist political history will be enthralled.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa is a timely and stimulating intervention that takes aim at the heart of some of the prominent modes of “anti-politics” in contemporary Black and decolonial thought. With provocative insight and perceptive judgement, Okoth rereads past moments and movements and discourses-from Bandung to Negritude to Pan-Africanism-in order to remind us of the transnational political critique to which they were variously committed. The project, needless to say, is not to urge a naïve nostalgic return to earlier strategies of Black and antiimperialist thinking. The project, rather, is to grasp the character of the current conjuncture, and to offer, partly from the remnants of the past in the present, a redescription of the legacies of national liberation, Marxism, and radical Black internationalism, an intellectual tradition Okoth calls “Red Africa,” so as to be able to simultaneously reclaim and rethink, recover and renew, the prospect of revolutionary Black futurities.”
—David Scott, author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment
“Okoth recounts key events in numerous parts of Africa, particularly but not exclusively, those countries which experienced revolutions led by Marxist parties and organizations…it is remarkable how much historical data Okoth condenses in a short book.”
—Mat Callahan, Socialism and Democracy
“Brief, but punchy.”
—Vijay Prishad and Mikaela Nhondo Erkog, Monthly Review
QUICK VIEW
