UC Santa Barbara

Through a close reading of Vijay Prashad’s (2007) The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and Yousuf Al-Bulushi’s (2020) intellectual geography of Cedric J. Robinson’s (1987) work, with particular attention given to Black Marxism; The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, this thesis attempts to reconcile their conjectures with those theories that posit an antiblack field of representation, I aim to make clear the ways in which the universal that is constructed at the expense of the particular is a bonafide marker of none other than antiblackness and it derivatives. More specifically, this thesis works to evince how this constructed universal (that is, antiblackness) neatly and unproblematically makes cogent the very concepts of both North-South Cooperation and its supposed divergent South-South Cooperation. Though the scope of this thesis is narrowed to considerations of international relations –in particular those Sino-Angolan relations– I understand the core of my analytical conjectures on the field of modern representation and on the persistence of antiblackness to have wide salience across the entire host of disciplines engaged in questions of hierarchy, oppression, and liberation.