Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers by Holger Weiss (review)

Abstract

T his book is a result of assiduous research, primarily in the archives of the Communist International (Comintern), in the former Soviet Union. Holger Weiss, a historian at the Abo Akademi University in Finland, traces the Comintern’s engagement with black radicalism, especially through the medium of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). The work meticulously traces the first black Communist activists, English-speaking AfroCaribbean migrants in the United States, who became the core of black Comintern cadres. The study then proceeds to examine early Comintern attempts to recruit followers in West Africa, a task made difficult not only by the fact that most of Africa was under European colonization at the time but that the African labor movement was still in its birth stages, as well as the fact that few Communists had experience in Africa.