A translocal study, “From Southern California to Southern Africa” examines the significance of local African American events to the global study of African liberation. Analyzing what I have termed the Black global spatial imaginary and solidarity-plus, this project examines the impact of major moments in the history of African liberation on African American activism and consciousness. Examining the rise solidarity-plus the first chapter, “Why Not the Same Concern?” is a case study of San Diego’s Congress of Racial Equality branch and the Afro-American Association cadres in San Diego and Los Angeles. Through direct action, revolutionary study, education, and expressive culture, African Americans and others in Southern California abandoned Cold War liberal ideologies and embraced Black Internationalism in theory and practice.

The growth of Black global spatial imaginary is dependent on African American identification with Africa but also African recognition of Black American struggles. In the second chapter, “Crisis of the African Intellectual: The Racial Encounters of African Students in the Cold War University,” higher education and migration became other ways in which solidarity-plus was practiced and the Black global spatial imaginary was expanded. I argue that the same conditions that brought African Americans into solidarity with African struggles influenced the embrace of African American liberation movements by African migrants to Southern California.

In my third chapter, “Towards the Black International,” I argue that the events following the Watts Rebellion of August 1965 was paradigm shifting moment for African American politics as well as international African liberation. Following the Watts Rebellion, youth and development becomes another practice of solidarity-plus. In Southern California, radicals of color battled the state for the minds and loyalty of Black youth in Southern California. War on Poverty programming was one place this struggle took place. Another place this struggle took place was in the Peace Corps.

Chapter four, titled “Ufahamu na Kuumba,” examines the work of two different types of radical collectives, the African Activists Association (AAA2), a radical African Studies group at UCLA, and the Nia Cultural Organization, a cadre of the Congress of African People in San Diego. For Nia and the AAA2, the study and practice of African revolutionary theory served as forms of solidarity-plus. With the African Activist Association’s journal Ufahamu and the grassroots activism of Nia’s community agency the Kuumba Foundation, these organizations continued the work of the Black Power movement and strengthened the antiapartheid movement in Southern California.

Chapter five, “Free South Africa, You Dumb SOB” I argue that the antiapartheid movement in Southern California was the accumulation of three decades of solidarity-plus. As the racial liberal era of American foreign and domestic policy receded it gave way to the rise in neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative social policy. As antiapartheid activists struggled against economic inequality, mass incarceration, police abuse, the neoliberal American university, and the cultural industry throughout Southern California, the movement accelerated. Reviving many of the campaigns of the 1960s, students and community organizations identified the links between the erosion of educational equity with the financing of apartheid and white-rule in Southern Africa by American colleges, cities, and corporations.

I end the dissertation with an examination of the black global spatial imaginary and solidarity-plus in the post-apartheid years in Southern California.

“A Freedom No Greater Than Bondage: Black Refugees and Unfree Labor at the Dawn of Mass Incarceration” centers the lives of Black refugees and formerly enslaved people whom the Union army incarcerated during and after the Civil War. This research tackles central questions: Why and how did the Union military justice system, which expanded to police white citizens’ politics, come to be used against the enslaved and recently emancipated? How did the U.S. state expand its carceral capacities in this period? While there have been many studies that center enslaved persons’ transition “from slavery to freedom” and the role of the Union army, I argue that the Union military justice system created a blueprint for a penal and carceral system that was later coopted by Democrat-controlled governments in the South. My work fills a critical gap in the scholarship by locating the dawn of mass incarceration in the Civil War rather than the Jim Crow era. I thus demonstrate how policing and state violence underpin what many think of as institutions and locations of progressive reform, bringing to light the process by which the enslaved became “slaves of the state.” Their narratives complicate popular understandings of emancipation, which elides continuing forms of slavery and fundamental role of anti-Blackness in nation-building. This study uses the trial records, testimonies, and letters of those who did not make it to freedom in 1865 and those who never made it all. I therefore use military records to trace the making of U.S. incarceration but also to foreground Black resistance against it.

“Dreams Eclipsed: Culture and Warfare in Black Los Angeles” investigates the language(s) of social analysis that emerges from Black Los Angeles since the 1940s in order to make sense of warfare at home and abroad. Engaging Black literature, film, and music, this dissertation bridges various fields ranging from Black studies, cultural studies, carceral studies, critical theory, as well as histories of California and the Third World to examine how Black life in Los Angeles has been made more or less possible when interrogated through transnational discourses of war and conquest. I draw on histories of African captivity to generate a theory of the material and ontological constraints that poor and working-class Black people occupy when living under the precarious auspices of domestic militarism. This dissertation examines watershed moments in U.S. American social life such as the Second World War, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the L.A. Riots of 1992 in order to illuminate the connection between the burgeoning warfare state and the increasing social and cultural permanence of mass incarceration, policing, and surveillance––i.e., the carceral state. Through examining carceral warfare and racial/gendered captivity as ideal structural features of postwar Los Angeles, this project situates Black working-class cultural production as a primary site for theorizing, navigating, and overcoming war at both the domestic and international scale. Key questions that drive this dissertation include: What can a place like Los Angeles say about the multiple discourses that allow logics of war to intersect with racialized and gendered captivity as logical conditions enabled through carcerality? Through Los Angeles’ expansion as a global, multi-ethnic metropolis, how is captivity understood as not only the condition that is produced by the carceral state, but also a condition that has always been transformed and depicted in Black arts and culture throughout the 20th century? At the core, “Dreams Eclipsed” deals with how Black people have not only constructed meanings of life and struggle in the city, but how Black culture in Los Angeles contributes to global narratives of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist struggles across the diaspora.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Americans understood the history of the south as singularly significant in the construction of the modern U.S. nation-state, due to an intense revival of popular interest in the Civil War, the development of a public discourse around the socio-political idea of the “New South”, and a cultural zeitgeist that valued both nostalgia and authenticity. “Antebellum, Inc.: Hollywood and the Construction of Southern Identity, 1920 - 1940” explores the process by which Hollywood crafted a mainstream socio-political narrative of “the south”, by using what I describe as the southern genre of film as the primary lens to understand the formation of a collective cultural knowledge and historical memory of that region. American audiences eagerly consumed the fictionalized antebellum and gothic narratives that were a hallmark of the southern genre, as evidenced by the popularity of Faulkner as a screenwriter, and the watershed moment in popular culture that occurred around release of GONE WITH THE WIND’s 1940 film adaption. Crucially, that interest extended beyond the movie theatre, as Americans also engaged in discoursing about distinctly contemporary “southern” issues, like prison chain gang labor, and a partial and unjust court system. The southern genre was crafted through the cooperation of producers (film studios), consumers (audiences), and interpreters (academics), and “Antebellum, Inc.” evinces its parameters by pressing the primary source material to reveal a mutually-dependent relationship between movie studios, audiences and scholars. The repercussions of this national moment, and of the southern genre, have been retained in the way Americans talk about the south and southerners as homogenized, anachronistic, and predictable while still seeming strange, unknowable, and just foreign enough to be palpably different and separate from the rest of the Union.

Black California Dreamin’: The Crises of California’s African-American Communities presents a diverse group of essays highlighting particular issues facing black communities in California. In this co-edited volume, the authors engage in thought-provoking analyses that include topics such as gentrification, education, foreclosures, homelessness, migration, incarceration, entrepreneurship, urban renewal, gun violence, youth violence, community building, asset stripping, black-brown relations, art as resistance, and the criminalization of poverty. The volume serves as an interdisciplinary contribution to the body of work in Black California Studies.