Charles R Holm | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Book Reviews by Charles R Holm

Journal of African American History, 2020

Eric Lott’s Black Mirror explores literature, film, music, drag performance, and Elvis impersonat... more Eric Lott’s Black Mirror explores literature, film, music, drag performance, and Elvis impersonators to locate and expose the “contradictions” as well as the “consequences of U.S. racism’s theaters of fantasy” (xv). Lott contends that racism, and specifically anti-Black racism, undergirds these theaters even when disavowed by their actors or not immediately recognizable on stage. From nineteenth-century minstrelsy to the present, Black Mirror attends to how the White racial imagination remains structured by a hegemonic Whiteness, informed by a persistent yet unpredictable “white racial desire” (6).

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/709354

E3W Review of Books, 2018

Futures of Black Radicalism establishes the various ways the Black radical tradition remains vita... more Futures of Black Radicalism establishes the various ways the Black radical tradition remains vital to thinking about and struggling for alternative futures seemingly closed within the current, yet always unstable, racial regime. It incites the reader to maintain what Erica Edwards and Robin D.G. Kelley describe as Cedric Robinson’s “measured optimism” or “notion of the possible,” sustaining our hopes in the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!

H-Net Reviews, 2019

While teaching an undergraduate course on Pan-Africanism, Hakim Adi realized that there were few ... more While teaching an undergraduate course on Pan-Africanism, Hakim Adi realized that there were few if any survey texts or overviews on the subject written in the twenty-first century suitable for use by his students. His newest work, Pan-Africanism: A History, addresses this nearly twenty-year gap with an astonishingly concise and extensively researched survey. Reviewing this remarkably comprehensive effort requires overlooking many themes, questions, and issues Adi raises. In these pages readers discover over one hundred organizations and perhaps ten times as many individuals important for understanding Pan-African thought and movements from the late eighteenth century up to the first decades of the twenty-first. Pan-Africanism is much more than a suitable general survey text for teaching undergraduates. Adi clearly builds off recent historical scholarship, and his selected bibliography demonstrates extensive primary source use and archival research, including unpublished correspondence and rare Pan-African publications in several languages. An original contribution to Pan-African histo-riography and the study of Africa and the African diaspora, this book offers much for undergraduates, emerging scholars, and established specialists to discover and explore.

Thesis Chapters by Charles R Holm

UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021

This dissertation traces a genealogy of early Black socialist thought beginning with the abolitio... more This dissertation traces a genealogy of early Black socialist thought beginning with the abolitionist movement through the ideas and efforts of Peter H. Clark and George Washington Woodbey, two of the most significant Black Socialists prior to World War I. While Clark was the first Black Socialist in terms of being the first to openly identify as a member of a Socialist party in the United States, this study argues Woodbey engaged in the first sustained effort, as a Black Baptist preacher, orator, and organizer for the Socialist Party of America, to make socialism relevant to the Black working class and extended a distinct tradition of Black radicalism within Black political thought.

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2014

May 2014 MA Thesis University of Nebraska Lincoln Department of History This project investigate... more May 2014 MA Thesis
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Department of History

This project investigates historical relationships between Black Radicalism and Marxist
internationalism from the mid-nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. It
argues that contrary to scholarly accounts that emphasize Marxist Euro-centrism, or that
theorize the incompatibility of “Black” and “Western” radical projects, Black Radicals
helped shape and produce Marxist theory and political movements, developing
theoretical and organizational innovations that drew on both Black Radical and Marxist
traditions of internationalism. These innovations were produced through experiences of
struggle within international political movements ranging from the abolition of slavery in
the nineteenth century to the early Pan-African movements and struggles against racism
and colonialism in the early twentieth century. Taking into account recent contributions
to the historiography of Black Radicalism and international Marxism in the twentieth
century, this thesis fills an important gap by examining how the “Black International”
influenced Karl Marx himself during the American Civil War. It also addresses the
contentious and problematic relationships between Black socialists and white Marxists in
the American Socialist Party, within the context of emerging Pan African movements and
the broader debates surrounding Marxism in the lead up to World War I. Additionally,
this thesis reexamines the relationships between Marxism and Black radicals following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, incorporating into its discussion the largely neglected
theoretical and organizational activities of the Marxist left that gravitated around Leon
Trotsky and the Left Opposition following 1928, rather than focusing strictly on figures
who remained organizationally and theoretically tied to the Communist International
during the 1930s and 1940s.

Papers by Charles R Holm

African American Studies Center, May 16, 2024

Oxford African American Studies Center, 2024

Long forgotten, Annie R. Woodbey (1855-1901) lived a truly remarkable life. A preacher, orator, a... more Long forgotten, Annie R. Woodbey (1855-1901) lived a truly remarkable life. A preacher, orator, activist, and intellectual, she belonged to some of the late nineteenth century’s most dynamic reform movements, and was the first wife of early Black socialist, Rev. George Washington Woodbey.

Journal of African American History, Jun 1, 2020

rather than focusing strictly on figures who remained organizationally and theoretically tied to ... more rather than focusing strictly on figures who remained organizationally and theoretically tied to the Communist International during the 1930s and 1940s. This project contends that within anti-slavery, anti-colonial, and anti-racist movements, Marxists produced important theoretical perspectives, organizational practices, and transnational political solidarities. The "foundational core" of both Marxism and Black internationalism as a Black radical tradition is "universal emancipation," 3 and the historical relationship between the two does not suggest an inherent antagonism. As Vivek Chibber has recently argued in his critique of postcolonial theory, Marxism's "cross-cultural" framework resists the label "Eurocentric," despite its European origins. "The history of Marxian analysis," Chibber points out, "exhibits an enduring appreciation of the fact that" non-European and non-Western societies "seem to be driven by logics that require fresh analysis and even, at times, a modification of received categories." 4 The theoretical and historical contributions of Black radicals W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James in the 1930s fall within this Marxist

Beginning with David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble, to the Colo... more Beginning with David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, and Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 call for a general strike to end slavery, this dissertation traces a genealogy of early Black socialist thought beginning with the abolitionist movement through the ideas and efforts of Peter H. Clark and George Washington Woodbey, two of the most significant Black Socialists prior to World War I. While Clark was the first Black Socialist in terms of being the first to openly identify as a member of a Socialist party in the United States, this study argues Woodbey engaged in the first sustained effort, as a Black Baptist preacher, orator, and organizer for the Socialist Party of America, to make socialism relevant to the Black working class and extended a distinct tradition of Black radicalism within Black political thought.

The Journal of African American History, 2020

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historydiss Part of the Africa... more Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historydiss Part of the African American Studies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Labor History Commons, Other Race, Ethnicity and post-Colonial Studies Commons, Political History Commons, Political Theory Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons