NewBlackNationalism.com
Frantz Fanon
In our January 1, 2020, message New Black Nationalists stated "The 2020's will be a decade of crisis, war, revolution, and the collapse of American Empire."
After fifteen million Black-led protesters revolted against George Floyd's murder across the globe; 450,000 people perished in the COVID-19 pandemic, a twice impeached Donald Trump, and a deadly white nationalists coup to overrun the U.S. Capitol last month, our predictive model is tracking with the confluence of events.
The current trajectory of American Empire is unstainable.
As things now stand, developments threaten to outpace our ability to process the theories and analysis needed to convert the looming existential crisis and civil war into a grand strategy to create a Black nation. New Black Nationalists are thus compelled to modify and accelerate production of the theoretical instruments of insurgency.
The four critical projects outlined here reflect critical areas we are addressing to prepare for an escalating national struggle. Beginning in February 2021, New Black Nationalists will take up the following tasks:
1. Adopting the corpus of Franz Fanon works as the guiding ideological system of the New Black Nationalist Movement in February 2021, and completing an analysis of Fanon's writings (Fanonism) that is aligned with NBN's Statement of Principles in February 2022.
2. Increasing the international outreach and influence of the new Black Diaspora Movement initiative we launched in September 2020.
3. Expanding our exchanges and deepening our relationship with the broader Black Feminist Movement.
4. Initiating a study project on the history, practice, and theories that guided "Black majority rule" in South Africa from 1994 to the present.
Background, Notes, and Study Materials for 2021
These tasks grow directly out the advances we made in 2020 in tripling our website's readership. They acknowledge the need to prepare for the transition from a pre-revolutionary to a revolutionary period.
When the NBN-Movement coalesced in early 2018, our mission to rebuild the canons of Black Nationalist thought first required that we demarcate our trend from Black Atlanticists, Afrofuturists, Afrocentrists, Afropessimists, Pan-Africanists, Black Separatists, Religious Nationalists and the Black-left.
Second, we needed to re-establish the foundational principles Black Nationalism by reaffirming Black people in Americas' settler state constitute a historically developed nation with a distinct Black identity and culture. We also reaffirmed that the historic goal of Black Nationalism since Martin Delaney's attempts in the 1850's to create a Black nation in Africa, is the struggle for land and the establishment of a Black majority-led nation.
Adopting Fanonism
Having accomplished these two objectives and developed a "Statement of Principles" in January 2020, it was clear that our project was still incomplete.
We lacked an overarching philosophical cosmos concerning a theory of knowledge, reality, and existence that cohered with our ideological beliefs embodied in the Statement of Principles. Frantz Fanon's extensive works emerged as the nexus fusing New Black Nationalists ideology to a forward leaning philosophical universe powered by phenomenology, dialectics, and "the lived experience."
The challenge before us now is not just subjecting Fanonism to a deeper analysis, but to expand and apply its interpretation to the unique revolutionary conditions in America's settler state.
The Black Diaspora Movement
In the course of 2020, New Black Nationalist thought also began making inroads among radicalizing youth and millennials in the U.S. and internationally. This was especially true of those rebel forces whose protests and larger vision of revolutionary possibilities migrated outside the political boundaries of the legacy Black Lives Matters Movement.
Our analysis identified a new global BLM 2.0 tendency, marked by divergent millennial and radical feminist impulses of Black consciousness. In October 2020, we initiated a new Black Diaspora Movement to test the proposition that the largest Black international uprising in history has signaled the sunrise of a new Black-led Global South movement.
We were moved to action by Professor Sebabatso Monoeli's observation that, "The current discourse on Black Lives Matter does not yet include anti-Black racism beyond how the west and white settler states experience and theorize it" (We Have No Harlem in Sudan - June 30, 2021). Accordingly, we seek to engender a Black Diaspora Movement that looks further eastward to incorporate the energy of the "Black Pacific" Melanesian Basin, and break the intellectual stranglehold of the Black Atlantic African Diaspora centered project.
A Strategic Alliance with Black Feminists
Central to New Black Nationalists' theory of revolutionary possibilities and nationhood in the 2020's, is continuing our efforts to develop a strategic alliance with Black Feminists.
Among our writings in 2020, we engaged on the matters of Feminism in the Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist movements, the feminist underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black Feminism and Black Identity and Black Nationalism, and Black Feminism and Frantz Fanon.
We cannot emphasize enough that the cornerstone of our revolutionary nationalist project is our relationship with the broad and complex Black Feminist Movement. It's no accident that many of our analytical articles are influenced by Black Feminist thought. Since the 1960's Black feminists have been theoretically flipping the world right-side up, while Black Nationalists have languished somewhat in the nostalgia of the Black Power.
There are significant barriers to overcome the legacy of Black Nationalists' painful attacks and dismissive attitude toward the Black Feminist Movement in the 1960's and 1970's. But we must persist. We are not the Black Nationalists of yesterday. We have much to learn from the successes of Black Feminists, and a great deal to contribute to our common interest in "standing up" the world's first post-heteropatriarchal society.
The South Africa Study Project
While completing our year-long project in 1922 to comprehensively development our analysis of Fanon's works, secondarily we are beginning a new study project on the South African revolutionary experience. Our focus is on the period beginning with Nelson Mandela and the ANC taking power in 1994.
There are several good reasons to study the South African Black-led nation-building experience.
Arguably, South Africa's Black radicals, Feminists, Afropessimists, Nationalists, Marxists and Biko/Fanon Black Consciousness adherents are the most well versed readers of revolutionary theory on the planet. The ruling African National Congress alone was founded 110 years ago. On multiple levels, the contemporary struggle of Blacks in South Africa to overcome 21st Century neocolonialism is rich in relevant lessons for our path forward in America's settler state.
The ANC and its allies possessed extensive revolutionary experience both as legal and banned organizations before ascending to power as a ruling coalition in 1994. So, how did Black majority-rule manage to leave the old white dominated neo-colonialist system of exploitation in place?
This is not simply an academic question for New Black Nationalists. The same thing could happen here in America's settler state in the midst of an existential crisis and governmental collapse. There are many plausible scenarios that could emerge out of an existential crisis.
It is entirely possible an imminent government collapse combined with the prospects of a long, bloody, and inconclusive civil war could lead to a brokered deal allowing left-wing Social Democrats, Black and Hispanic Democrats to run most of the country.
Concessions could be granted allowing regional white majority rule in the Midwest and Mountain West states, while essentially leaving the ruling class in power with certain restrictions imposed on its control of capital, profit-taking and the macro-economy. Indeed, the majoritarian "Browning of America," could conceivably morph into a South African prototype of the "Bleaching of America."
In part, Mandela and the ANC came to power, as the result of a deal Mandela cut to avoid a bloody civil war with the old Afrikaner regime--one neither side could win militarily.
New Black Nationalists thank our network participants, all organizations and parties we interacted with, and our international and U.S. readers for making 2020, a great year for our revolutionary movement. We look forward to 2021 with great anticipation and confidence that we will meet and capture the moment.
Selwyn Trench,
NewBlackNationalism.com
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Below we have listed recommended reading materials:
Frantz Fanon:
The Wretched of the Earth -- Toward the African Revolution
Black Skin, White Masks -- A Dying Colonialism
Frantz Fanon by Peter Hudis
Frantz Fanon Conflicts and Feminisms by C. Denean Sharpley Whiting
Frantz Fanon, A Biography by David Macey
Fanon's Dialectic of Experience of Atu Sekyi-Oto
On South Africa
The President Keepers by Jacques Pauw
Nelson Mandela, Dare Not Linger by Mandla Langa
After the Party by Andrew Feinstein
Thabo Mbeki, Battle for the Soul of the ANC by William Gumede
Black Feminists
Becoming Black by Michelle Wright
Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory by Patricia Hill Collins
Black Feminism Reimagined by Jennifer Nash
Culture and Literary Theory
African American Literary Theory, Edited by Winston Napier
The Black Arts Movement, James Edward Smethurst
The 2021 Action Plan for New Black Nationalists Notes from "The Trench" & 2021 Reading Lists
