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The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought

November 3 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

CSAAD Africa~Diaspora Forum Series
Dr. Leslie James
Queen Mary University of London
Tuesday, November 03, 2026
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
20 Cooper SQ, Room 503
New York City, NY 10003
Zoom link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/95683337909

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people.
Illuminating an extraordinary period in the history of Black Atlantic political thought, The Moving Word vividly portrays the power of experimental media which sustained and expressed political and social movements for Black autonomy.
For accommodations, please contact the Assistant Director for the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora at ac8829@nyu.edu.
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Bio:

Leslie James is Reader in Global History at Queen Mary University of London who writes about the circulation of political thought between West Africa and the Caribbean. Her first book was on the pan-African Marxist, George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2015).  She has edited and republished the work of several Caribbean thinkers, including C.L.R. James’s Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Duke University Press, 2022) and the Jamaican nationalist Wilfred Domingo, Red and Black in Harlem and Jamaica (Pluto, 2025). She is now working on the convergence of anti-colonialism, anti-fascism, and anti-apartheid in Black radical thought, which will extends from an article in American Historical Review ‘Blood Brothers: Colonialism and Fascism as Relations in interwar West Africa and Caribbean’ (2022).

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  • Date: November 3
  • Time:
    5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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