R. Joseph Parrott, "Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism" (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

A

Welcome to the New Books Network.

B

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Joseph Parrott, who is here to tell us about a book he's published with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025 titled Dream the Size of How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism, which is a book kind of exploring and connecting lots of different ideas and existing connections between those ideas. So we're going to be talking about Portuguese African liberation movements, so, for instance, in countries like Angola or Mozambique or Guinea Bissau, for instance. But we're also going to be talking about the Cold War. We're going to be talking about US Domestic politics, and we're going to be talking about congressional politics in the United States and how all of these things are not separate from each other, are in fact, very much linked through ideas, through people, across different places, across different times. There's this whole world of networks and connections for us to explore. So, Jo, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

A

Thank you for hosting. I'm happy to be here.

B

Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

A

Yeah. So my name is Joe Parrott. I'm an associate professor of diplomatic and transnational history at the Ohio State University in the United States. And, yeah, so. So this book actually started in grad school. This was. This was my dissertation. And it grew from the dissertation. It grew a lot, actually. But it actually goes all the way back. The origins of this actually go back to when I was in high school or secondary school. When I was in high school, the United States invaded Afghanistan. It also invaded ir, and we had these extended wars. And it wasn't just the wars I was interested in. It was actually this ideal of nation building and what the role of the US Had. And as I was in college, I got more and more interested in not just this idea of nation building, but this idea of how do we deal with these post colonial states, these countries that emerged in the modern international order out of essentially colonialism, and how do these fit into the international system? Um, and what is the role of the United States in this? And so I was very interested when I went to grad school in dealing with these ideas of decolonization, post colonialism, nation building, things like that. And when I was looking for a dissertation topic, I looked at a bunch of different places, a bunch of different potential case studies that allow me to talk about these, these topics that interested me. And I eventually settled on Portuguese Africa largely because it was kind of an area that people hadn't looked at as much. Portuguese decolonization in general was an understudied topic. Not this just in this transnational international sense, but, but just in general because it was in some ways the last European empire. It didn't decolonize until 1975, which is well after a lot of the literature, you know, focused on that period of the 1960s, the year of Africa in 1960, when so many of these countries gain independence. A number of others are promised independence in the future. 1960, 1966, in many ways, kind of ends the era of decolonization. And I always found it a little strange that, you know, these large portions of Africa, Angola, Mozambique, very large countries didn't gain independence until 1975. And I've always been attracted, as a scholar, even as a student, to these outliers, to these puzzles that don't quite fit with those major narratives, because I think rather than just treating them as kind of we don't quite know where to put these in, I often think that putting these outliers into conversation with those narratives sometimes reveals underappreciated aspects of history, trying to figure out how they fit, why they seem to be outliers, why they, they get this extra 10, 15 years after decolonization ends. It tends to actually illustrate some of the, maybe underlying trends that exist, but people aren't quite as aware of. So when I started looking at this project, that's what I was kind of hoping to do, asking myself, what does Portuguese Africa, Portuguese decolonization say about not only larger narratives about decolonization, larger narratives about the, the international system and the role of the United States in the Cold War in this larger process. So that's, that's essentially what I, I was trying to do when, when I started looking at this book. And it was originally supposed to be this nice, kind of neat diplomatic history. And I was going to look at triangulation in the United States and Portugal and Brazil and Africa and some of these things. And then when, when I got into the archives, I, I, I saw the Portuguese not just complaining about, you know, John Kennedy's UN vote in 1961. I saw against their interest in Angola, but I saw them complaining about Protestant missionaries. I saw them complaining about an American, a small American organization, civil rights kind of international organization called the American Committee on Africa. And I was like, well, what's going on here? And as I started pulling on these strings Looking at the American Committee on Africa, looking at what these religious institutions were doing, I found that there was a much bigger kind of grassroots story that intersected with these nationalist movements that intersected with decolonization. And as I started pulling on those strings, my kind of neat sweater of a diplomatic history fell AP and I found something much more expansive but I think much more interesting. That really got to some of those underlying questions about the nature of decolonization that I was most interested in.

B

Well, you've laid out a whole bunch of things for us to explore there, so thank you for that introduction. I think we're going to sort of try and unpick some of these connections by kind of focusing on certain pieces at a time and then kind of zoom out and see how they map together. So obviously reading the book, a really key sort of thing we need to talk about is the C O N C P P what was this? And if we're looking at kind of this organization and scale, what sorts of relationships and people are we seeing connections being built around?

A

Yeah. So the, the first thing I'll do and every time I give a talk about this, I always apologize that my book is a flood of acronyms. There are just so many acronyms and I would put military historians to shame with the amount of acronyms I use. But, but yeah, I think that is a good area to start. So the, the CNCP is the Conferencia das Organizations Nacio Nationalistas Does Colonias Portuguesos. It. It's. My Portuguese is always kind of rough and the, the longer I talk the, the bigger it gets. But it's the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies and it was founded in, in 1961 to, to kind of represent a group of these nationalist organizations. But the history actually goes back much, much further and it's a good entry point to talking about Portuguese anti colonialism and Portuguese Empire in general. So this is formed in 1961, but there's a longer history behind it. Understand about the CUNCP is that Portugal was a dictatorship from the 1930s onward. It's on the kind of fascist spectrum we talk about as a fascist dictatorship. But you know, it's not, it's not Nazi Germany or even Mussolini's Italy. It's, it's think of it as, as that kind of, you know, whole society being organized together, but maybe a little bit less bombastic than Mussolini. The dictator who is in charge named Antonio Salazar was actually a very kind of staid, literally didn't like using heating kind of things. He was a financial guy, but he takes over Portugal in the 1930s and essentially organizes the society around this one central concept of this estado and over the new state. And what's important about the Estado Novo is that it has that same kind of fascist element where this is a great state. We're kind of getting more to work towards this common project. But in order to make tiny Portugal a great state, you need to really center empire in this Portuguese narrative, going all the way back to Henry the Navigator, you know, kind of discovering all these roots, making Portugal one of the great seafaring nations. And so when. When Antonio Salazar is. Is building up Portugal in the 1930s and 1940s, he's really centering it on the empire. This is going to prop up Portugal economically. Angola, Mozambique, much larger countries than is tiny Portugal, whose primary export at this time is cork and people, essentially. And so he's. He's saying, if we're going to be a. We need to have this empire. And so he's very resistant to any of this wind of change that starts blowing after 1945 and beforehand across the African continent. And because it's a dictatorship, he uses this really tight control of these colonies to tamp down any nationalist firm. It. These nationalist feelings, they're real. They're felt, but they're very much tightly controlled. Here. There's a limit on who can vote. There's a secret police that makes sure that there's not a lot of nationalist organizing. There's no kind of allowance for especially African political parties, let alone political parties in general. And so there's not really a lot of space for African nationalists to organize. And so when African nationalism comes together, it's coming together either in exile or in these very small spaces that are created within the Portuguese empire, like universities, where sometimes people can kind of think a little bit more freely. And so this is what. What happens with African nationalism is it kind of takes place outside these nations and then comes back into it. And so we see that these Portuguese colonies, the big ones, especially of Angola and Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, these folks can organize locally, so they organize where they can. And in Angola, there are a number of different groups, but there's an Angola Bakongo nationalist group that kind of forms in the Belgian Congo. That'll become important under the leadership of eventually a guy named Holden Roberto. But there's a bigger group that actually coheres in Lisbon. There's not a lot of opportunity for advancement for African colonials, but there's a very small group that's able to gain access to secondary education and then eventually college education in Lisbon. And there are multiple universities in Lisbon, often kind of agrarian, often technical. And they come together as these Africans who are coming from different colonies, coming from Angola, coming from Mozambique, coming from Guinea Bissau, coming from Goa in India, among other places. And they're identifying with each other as colonial and as Africans kind of more broadly in these spaces in Lisbon, where they feel very left out of Portuguese society, despite the fact that Portugal says nominally a race blind society. And so they find each other, they rediscover together not only their African roots, but this kind of joint commitment to liberating each of their individual colonies. And they're doing this together. And so there's this very close association of folks who, who met and started collaborating in Lisbon. You have people like Emil Garcabral from Guinea Bissau, also Cabo Verde, who goes back and organizes a political party called the PAIGC that links these two things. There's Agostino Neto from Angola, goes back and organizes the mpla, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, along with some other folks. And there's people like Marcelino dos Santos from Mozambique, who's going to be invol with frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Front. And each of them are going back and forming their own nationalist groups. And you know, they eventually form those ones I just mentioned, they're actually forming a bunch of different ones at this point. But they're going back and they're forming their own nationalist groups. But they have these connections with each other and they keep those up and they're kind of associating with each other and legitimizing their political movements by referring to, oh, Cabral, NATO, Marcelino dos Santos, these kinds of people. And as they actually start getting a little bit of organizing going, they get these small, often either clandestine or external nationalist movements forming in the late 1950s, early 1960s. They start actually trying to figure out how can we collaborate internationally? And that's where the CO NCP comes in. This is one of a number of organizations that's formed in the late 50s, 1960s. It kind of sticks around the longest, but it's formed in 1961 with the idea of uniting all these parties that are operating in their individual colonies together at the international level so they can collaborate, but especially to collaborate on essentially making these international appeals, trying to put pressure on Portugal to decolonize and find support in some way, shape or form for these liberation movements that are going to start trying to claim political power in the 1960s in these individual colonies. So this is essentially their organization where they can not only maintain these associations they've had going all the way back to the 1950s, 1940s even, in some case. But it's a way for them to also kind of pool their efforts internationally and make appeals to try to put pressure on Portugal and move towards decolonization.

B

All right, so let's talk about some of these appeals and putting pressure on internationally. How, for instance, were these various African nationalists from the different kind of Portuguese colonies, How were they trying to get US Support in these sort of early stages?

A

Yeah, so. So this is an interesting question. I will say that with the book. The book focuses on the United States, but this is actually a larger story. There. There are appeals to a number of Western nations, including France, the United Kingdom, in fact, the, the mpla. One of their first big kind of attempts to, to get political attention is actually sponsored by an MP in London who gives them a microphone and says, hey, you know, make a claim to. To Angolan independence. So they're actually making these broad appeals. But I focus in on the United States, one, because that's, that's the context I'm most familiar in. And two, because I thought it told a really interesting story about this specific political system. But it's one that, that. And there was a chapter in my dissertation where there's similar things happening in the uk in the Netherlands and these other places, but the United States is the big superpower during this period. So it's, it's very important. And so looking at the United States as this one example of larger and Western appeals, you know, the CNC parties in particular, but nationalists in general, including Holden Roberto in Angola, slash the Congo, they're appealing to the United States because it's the major superpower. It's the country that. That has the ability to put pressure on Portugal to, to kind of strong arm Portugal into potentially accepting this idea of decolonization, which Antonio Salazar just refuses to kind of consider. Right. Because if you, if you allow decolonization to happen, essentially Portugal becomes a tiny little state. It's. It's no longer important. It's no longer an. No longer a great European state. And there's a fear, especially in Portugal, that, you know, some of these other colonies, Britain, France, they're able to decolonize because they still keep this influence. They're still economically powerful, they're still militarily powerful. So, you know, they still have this ability to, to kind of play an influence in their former Colonies through things like the British Commonwealth. But Portugal doesn't have that. I mean, if you, if you've ever been to Portugal, even, you know, culturally, Brazil telenovelas are really, really big there because Brazil is a much bigger Portuguese speaking country and Cola is a bigger Portuguese speaking country. And so there's a sense that if Portugal decolonizes, it's going to be put on the back burner. And so it's absolutely not going to do that. But the only other claim that Portugal has to importance is being a member of the Western alliance, being a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And so if Portugal is going to decolonize, the only thing it can do is kind of, you know, hold on to that Western identity. And that Western identity runs through the United States for the most part during this period. So these nationalists are hoping that if they can appeal to the American government and it kind of strong arms Portugal into making some kind of concessions, that maybe they can, you know, either get a foot in the door and advance their cause, or maybe even that they can get Portugal to completely kind of exit the colony. So there these nationalist groups are appealing to the United States government and they're appealing mainly to the executive branch. Beginning in the 1950s, the American Committee on Africa helps Holden Roberto start cultivating alliances. Actually first in Congress, but with a guy named John Kennedy, who's a young, ambitious senator, head of the Africa subcommittee in the Senate. He actually has a meeting with Holden Roberto and seems sympathetic to these nationalist causes. And so when Kennedy runs for election in 1960 and he ends up winning, there's a real hope that there might actually be some effort to get the United States to swing their, their votes, swing their power against Portugal. And so these African nationalists are trying to take advantage of this in Angola. They're actually two different efforts. There's a successful one led by Holden Roberto that actually starts a revolution in 1961 that Portugal has to respond to. And the hope is that, that the United States will put pressure on Portugal to respond in a different way. Not just militarily, not just a crackdown, but maybe moving towards some kind of negotiated settlement. And there's actually a short victory. There's a short moment where this seems to work. In 1961, the Kennedy government, having just come in, actually votes against Portugal in the UN votes with the Soviet Union saying that Portugal needs to move towards some kind of liberalization of its politics in its colonies. That scene is a really big victory. Holden Roberto kind of praises this as a victory. And again in August, the United States limits the amount of military material that can be sent to Portugal. It's still going to, you know, allow Portugal to. To kind of gain access to American material for their NATO defense purposes. But it's supposed to limit the. The kind of small arms, some boats and things like that, that can be used for warfare in Angola, but that's about it. And, and we see from August 1961 a retreat away from that. There's not very strong enforcement of that arms embargo. Portugal's things and then kind of change up their configuration to. To use them militarily. It takes a lot of its NATO weapons and sends it down. And the United States only kind of protests kind of quietly.

B

And.

A

And that's the kind of high points of, you know, this American effort. They're repeated attempts to try to get the, you know, the Kennedy administration to do something. But for the most part, the Kennedy administration doesn't want to upset the apple cart in NATO. It's afraid of alienating Portugal. It's afraid of weakening the alliance. And even a country as weak as Portugal, which doesn't have a lot to offer except some kind of strategic islands in the mid Atlantic, they're afraid the government is that if Portugal leaves NATO because it's just so angry over how its colonies are being treated, that that could lead to a ripple effect. It could lead to France leaving, it could lead to Belgium leaving. It could lead to a general weakening of NATO. So it doesn't really work, these appeals to the executive branch, but there's still this idea among these nationalists that they. They know that there's a sympathetic cohort, a sympathetic population within the United States and within these other Western countries because we have, you know, these connections to leftists in, In France and Portugal and other places, we have missionary connections. A lot of these. These nationalists, like Holden Roberto, like Augustino Neto and like a guy named Eduardo Mulan from Mozambique, educated in missionary schools before they went on to Lisbon. So they. They know that they're sympathetic American populations who at least, if not directly, support, you know, their specific nationalist causes, support the idea of decolonization and freedom and these things. So there's still this effort to kind of reach out to them, and we can talk a little bit more about that either now or later.

B

Yeah, I think we will probably talk about a bunch of that sort of in pieces, because there's a few different things you've mentioned there I want to draw out. So first, before we get to the potential allies, even outside the executive branch, the kind of High point that then doesn't last. Right. You gave a clear reason there in terms of the US not wanting to upset the Apple card and the kind of concerns about NATO. And we all know in the Cold War context how much prioritization that got. Was there also though, an aspect of counter lobbying? Like, for example, was the Portuguese state going around and being like, hey Kennedy, don't you like also too? Like, was that a factor at all?

A

Yeah, so that's, that's a big factor. And one of the things I always say about this is that that Portugal had the kind of home field advantage. Right. If this is the level of high diplomacy, Portugal already has a seat at the table. It's already a NATO member, it's a member of the United nations, it's an official government. Right. So it can use all those diplomatic apparatuses. And if Holden Roberto or the CNCP folks, they need to go back channel and talk to these local New York groups like the American Committee on Africa and get them to introduce them to Kenned. You know, Portugal has an ambassador who can just go and request an audience with the State Department or even the President, right? So Portugal already has that diplomatic power, but it's not, you know, just using that diplomatic power alone. It's also actually directly lobbying not just the U.S. the, the executive branch, not just the president, but the larger U.S. government. And so not only is Portugal using its traditional powerful diplomatic, you know, apparatus, but it's actually going out and hiring lobbying firms. Public Relations Forum in New York. They'd now be the kind of K Street mob, right, that are going and kind of making positive representations of what Portugal represents and negative reputations of what these revolutions represent to politicians kind of across the political spectrum. And this is the early kind of era of what we might call now nation branding, where countries very specifically try to make sure that they're their popular imagery is well received in order to maintain political support. And so Portugal actually goes out and hires this lobbying firm that, that creates this campaign in the United States. And it works not only with this lobbing firm, but also Portuguese Americans, including this well connected Portuguese guy in, in Massachusetts, to, to kind of, you know, do a full court press and try to make sure that politicians understand one, why Portugal is necessary to NATO defense, but also to what, what they're doing kind of for the west in Africa. So we have these, you know, small kind of pamphlets that come out after the Angolan rebellion happens, after that UN vote happens. That's essentially talking about Portugal holding the line against communism in Africa. It's, it's portraying all these revolutions who are leftist for the most part, but portraying all of them as essentially Soviet puppets. And, and Portugal is protecting Western territory, protecting Africa, protecting this traditional area of influence for Europe and the United States against this, this communist invasion. And at the same time it's also playing this very interesting game of racial politics because of course, issues of civil rights, of race are really central to the United States. And so when it's producing these, what are often very graphic, very grisly pamphlets, it's showing these, these Portuguese white colonists being kind of brutally massacred, largely because a lot of the upridings involved not only guns, but also machetes and things like that, because that's what people had on them. And they weren't racially targeted. They targeted anyone who was associated with these Portuguese settlement. But the images that specifically made the United States were always of these white settlers. And so it's, it's playing this kind of race baiting politics that it never says out loud. But all of this imagery is about essentially this, this, this kind of white settler group that's being massacred by these African peoples. And, and the imagery that they create, the, the kind of art that they create at the front of these pamphlets kind of reinforces that. And they're very much appealing. They're sending the, the kind of most grisly examples of these pamphlets to southern senators who have problems with civil rights, who are worried about, you know, these creations of these new black African countries in, in the continent. And they're very much playing that. But at the same time, Portugal has this other kind of appeal that they're making at the UN to, to some northern groups where they're saying that, that only Portugal is actually prepared to kind of guide these African societies to a kind of new modernity. Because Portugal is distinctly unracialized. It doesn't have a formal racial barrier. There's no, nothing like apartheid in South Africa. In fact, there's a long history of kind of Portuguese intermarriage and the creation of mestizo populations or mixed race populations in places like Brazil, but also in, in some of these African colonies. And this is often called Lusotropicalism, Lusotropicalismo in, in especially Brazilian kind of sociology. And the Portuguese adopt this. And so they have this weird like two sided press where they're race baiting on one hand, but on the other hand they're also advancing this idea that only they have the, the advanced racial politics and this long history in Africa to kind of build up these societies in a way that would be acceptable to Western, Western groups. So it's this very interesting thing and they're making these different appeals to different groups to try to shore up support. And it's actually really, really effective. In the early 1960s, you have most of Congress getting behind Portugal, supporting Portugal and actually putting pressure on the Kennedy administration to kind of back off some of its more heavy handed policies that it's, it's kind of advancing in August and beforehand, August 61st and beforehand, which

B

is definitely interesting to see kind of the multiple audiences and the multiple techniques going on. But of all the messages you just mentioned, I think the one I most want to pick up on is the kind of political, you know, oh, they're all just communists, right? Because that's definitely part of the messaging. And you sort of mentioned, you're like, well, and these movements are generally leftist. Now, of course that doesn't mean that they're communist or Soviet puppets. But what is this new left internationalism that's developing?

A

Yeah, so, so I think it's worth, I mean, so one of the things that we see here is a lot of these nationalist movers do tend to lean toward the left partially because, you know, a more kind of traditional right nationalism is almost closed to them. Right. Because, because Portugal kind of prevents that from happening. You can't have a kind of stayed. Let's look back at our national history partially because, you know, the history of Africa is erased during this period. So they're very much attaching themselves kind of rapid modernization of the Soviet Union, not, not of the Soviet Union proper, but of that kind of leftist model. But they're very much not Soviet. They're, they're part of what I've called in another book, Tri Continental, where they're, they're taking bits and pieces of Marxism, of leftism, even of liberalism, and they're attaching it to these very nationalist programs that aren't really thinking about a communist international. And so they're assembling this kind of very localized, very African, to some extent, global south vision of what revolution looks like. And it's, it's more closely aligned with the Soviet Union. So the Soviet Union and more often actually some of the satellite countries are willing to support these revolutions. But, but even the Soviet Union, there's a wonderful book by Natalia Telepnevo who talks about this. Even the Soviet Union's like, oh, they're not really communist, right. But they're willing to kind of make this alliance with them. And one of the things that I actually say is that this is a shift, right, this tri continental idea is a shift away from that kind of, of old style of communism, old style of leftism that's very much focused on the industrialized worker because there aren't industrialized workers. Rather this is a campaign for communal self determination. And I think this shift from that kind of international proletariat communism to a kind of more rural nationalist liberation based leftism also has an impact on the way that the left organizes in the United States. And one of the things about frelimo, the mpla, the pigc, they really believe that their global visions of liberation could have a transformative effect on U. S politics. One of the reasons, and western politics generally, one of the reasons why they're making these grassroots appeals, what I call grassroots diplomacy, is because they're trying to change official attitudes by getting people to organize. And they believe that, you know, there's a group of people who really could, could kind of identify with their politics, not just, you know, sympathize with them, but actually say, hey, we're part of this larger global movement towards decolonization, towards rethinking international affairs together. And I think this very much dovetails with the new left politics, the 68 generation politics that are happening in the United States and in Western Europe. And historians have often looked at, you know, that new left of the 1950s and 1960s as this kind of, of Western led response to this age of abundance, at the same time that these fields of global war, nuclear destruction, a recognition of inequality within these Western societies. But I also think that it represents this recognition that decolonization is having an impact on global politics and also on domestic American politics. It's requiring a new engagement with the priorities of the global south and a rethinking of the way that global Norse societies have kind of operated in the world and kind of, you know, ruled over parts of Latin America, of Africa, of Asia. And so this idea of new left internationalism is this shifting worldview that's very much mirroring this global shift where we're breaking with this old left fixation on class conflict. We're focusing instead on issues of global racial equality, the preservation of authentic cultures, economic development projects that promote greater equity, and also the, the danger of, of global wars. And there needs to be a more democratic formulation of policymaking both internally and internationally in order to kind of address these various issues that are really central to these new leftists. And, and yeah, so that's, that's kind of what's going on here. It's, it's a larger global shift, but it's, it's actually affecting the very idea of what the, the left thinks is going on and what this new generation that's coming up in the late 1950s and 1960s believe leftism is. And so New Left internationalism is this way of connecting the new Left of the west and what I think is the tri continental politics of the global south during this period.

B

And is this what's getting at least some members of the US Congress to start getting involved in the Con CP's efforts? I mean, you talked about them kind of operating almost the other way earlier. How do we get some members of Congress being on board with all of this?

A

Yeah, so I mean, it's a process that happens here. And I think one of the things that's interesting here is there is, you know, the Congress is kind of this, this almost Cold War liberal institution. A lot of people kind of buy in to that, you know, that, that Cold War kind of consensus that's happening here. But there are, you know, different politics at the margins. And one of the reasons why Congress becomes so central to this book is because there's a real diversity of actors who have a real diversity of politics and they have different priorities and they, they get attracted to this international freedom struggle coming from, from different angles. And some of the early ones are coming because of, you know, very specific things. So there's a guy named Charles Diggs, he's an African American, a Michigan congressman, one of the early kind of civil rights congressmen who's really organizing for this. He becomes the first head of the Black Congressional Caucus when it's formed in the 1970s. But he, and he's famous for, for being the congressman who attends Emmett Till's funeral. And he adopts very early on, literally 1961, an interest in not just decolonization, but specifically in these Lusophone African movements. And at first in 1961, he's one of the only people who's really looking at this. But he begins by investigating, among other things, the lobbying that Portugal sponsoring corporate activities that eventually show an investment by Gulf Oil Corporation in Angola, the, that the Portuguese government is then using to offset some of the costs of its war and in order to, to get some of this information because he's kind of not quite a lone crusader, but he's, it's him and a few other people who are interested in things like human rights. They start working with these activists to, to try to get the, these American activists to try to get these new perspectives on what's going on in Africa. And they start not only sharing information back and forth, but coordinating some of their activities. And he starts gaining kind of connections with some of these nationalists who are operating in, in Lusophone Africa. And so Diggs, when he finally gets the ability to, to control the, the, the Africa Subcommittee of the Congressional Foreign Relations or the House Foreign Relations Committee, he actually invites Cabral to testify to Congress. And so what he's doing is he's introducing this kind of global south perspective into some of these American political debates. And it's kind of fascinating because Diggs is not a huge, hugely radical character. I mean, he's a politician, right? He can only be. But so radical, especially during this Cold War era. And there's a lot of friction, especially at first, between him and especially some of the, the youth that are part of this movement, especially some black power folks who wants him to take more radical stands on, on countries like Israel. But, but he becomes this really important figure and he becomes actually pretty widely respected within the activist community because of what he is willing to do do, and because of how well he's actually able to take some of these ideas, take some of these concerns, and even take actors like Cabral and introduce them to Capitol Hill. And what we see is that there's a burgeoning interest in this movement. As the kind of makeup of Capitol Hill changes In the late 1960s and 1970s, you start seeing some of the first Vietnam generation people like Dick Clark, a senator from Iowa, and his Congress in 1972. You have the early, you know, kind of Watergate babies in 72, 74, who are more willing to kind of challenge executive privilege and want to expand the power of Congress. And each of them kind of for their own reasons, kind of becomes attracted to this idea of, of Lusophone internationalism partially because it's. It's a little bit easier. Is it radical? Yes, but it's. It's easier to get on board with this idea of opposing the last colonial empire, right, Than it would be of supporting the National Liberation Front fighting in Vietnam, or even supporting, you know, a group like the African National Congress who's fighting against a sitting government in apartheid South Africa, you know, opposing Portuguese colonialism, this last holdout of an era that seems to be over that. That's a lot easier for these folks who are kind of looking for an angle to embrace some radical politics without seeming so radical that they can't get reelected. So that's what you see happening in Congress there. And it becomes this real avenue for injecting these new left ideas and also these Global south ideas into congressional and political deliberations that have been dominated by the Cold war up until 1965, 66, 67.

B

Yeah, that's a really interesting element of the kind of combination, I suppose of the grassroots and the sort of high power politics. And of course the grassroots is something that you talk about being important, not just when we're talking about U.S. congress. So can we talk about the Zambia group network and grassroots activism there?

A

Yeah, so, absolutely. So I do think grassroots is really important. One of the things that I make in this argument is that grassroots politics, especially transnational grassroots politics, is a way for kind of marginalized national group or international groups to gain access to this diplomatic wrangling when they don't have representation themselves. So we have these non state actors in Fremo, in the mpla, the pigc, who, who want to essentially be governments. You know, they see themselves as governments in waiting essentially. Once Portugal gets out, we're going to go in, we're going to have all those diplomatic tools. But the international system has them kind of locked out and looking up right at that high level diplomacy. And so grassroots activism is a way for them to get their message out, to get their message across, to do that kind of nation branding even before they have a nation and to represent their interests, almost kind of have these grassroots ambassadors. And I originally called the book, the original title was going to be Grassroots Diplomacy. Then my publisher was like, ah, that's not quite as catchy. Can you give us something else? Right, but, but I think that idea of grassroots diplomacy is really important because it's a way for these marginalized groups to gain access to power. But what that means is that they have to rely on these folks who are organizing within these societies and they need somebody to help translate their interests. Right. Because they don't have this professional diplomatic class whose job is essentially to translate politics across borders. And so they end up relying on, on these local actors, these local allies, again, not just in the United States, but, but we'll again focus in the United States. And one of the first groups that I think really represents not only this grassroots diplomacy, but also the decentralized nature of, of New left internationalism, which I talk about a little bit more, is, is this Zambia group. And, and the Zambia group's really interesting because they're essentially a group of American kind of youth missionaries who go to Africa. But they're part of this new generation that's rethinking These traditional relationships between, you know, the, the Global north and the Global South. We already have some of these Global south ideas starting to, to change the way institutions understand these relationships. And beginning in the 1950s, there are a number of, of kind of liberal Protestant leaders who start saying, hey, we have this thing called decolonization. It's changing these relationships between countries and we need to recognize this. And so we don't have as Westerners a monopoly on not just knowledge but kind of wisdom. And so rather than, you know, taking the religion and modernity and science to these, you know, benighted folks in Africa, we need to start rethinking that and realize that, that, that actually, you know, that's, that's been part of the problem, right? That's part of empire, that's part of this heavy handedness of, of the way the, the Global North Europe and the United States have, have worked traditionally. And so what we need to start doing is, is re examining this. And so they actually set up a, a program these Protestant leaders called the Frontier Internship and Mission or the fim. And rather than sending out these missionaries to, to spread religion, essentially they send out these folks to, to work in local communities to take, you know, what education, expertise, they have stuff. But a lot of times these 20 somethings who don't have a lot of expertise, right, how, how well versed in, you know, various things are, are, you know, 20 year old kids. A lot of what they're doing is actually going and engaging in a dialogue with these, these folks in places like modern day Zimbabwe, which was then Rhodesia, in Mozambique to a, to a small extent, but mostly in, in places like Zambia and, and Rhodesia and some of these other places. And these, these Americans come back and oftentimes they interacted with some of these exiled nationalist groups. They certainly have their perspectives on Africa change. They're often impressed by how vibrant these young societies are. They're impressed with the requests that they're making for aid, but not quite tutelage from Americans. And so and they're also kind of frustrated with, you know, these, these old ideas of, of American superiority that still seem to exist at a certain level within some of these, these religious institutions. So they come back and they don't, they don't break with, you know, these Protestant churches who have sent them over there, this Protestant leadership that still sends a lot of aid to these countries, but rather they start trying to reform these institutions from the inside. And they form what's called the Zambia Group, which is this group of, you know, 10 to 1220 somethings who, who meet on a semi regular basis and start organizing all these kind of, of local kind of information sharing activist groups. Wherever they kind of end up, you know, whether it be Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, North Carolina, wherever they kind of end up going back to. They start setting up these little individual organizations to try to make people aware of these nationalist revolutions and these nationalist nation building efforts that are, that are happening in, in Africa and try to get people to meet those African nationalists where they are not kind of tell them, hey, you need to go slow, not say, hey, you can't demand this revolution. They say, we need to get behind them and support whatever efforts they're making to, to build these new societies. And that's what we're going to do. And that's going to be the main thing. And so they start spreading this information through newsletters, through educational outreach, through collaborating with Africans who are, for instance, at Michigan State University or at the University of Wisconsin, giving them platforms so they can explain, you know, what the revolutions are trying to achieve, what these new nations are trying to build. And they start, you know, kind of winning over not just kind of a youth movement, not just student youth who become interested in this, but they also start winning, you know, getting the attention of religious leaders who are interested in trying to figure out how can we reform our churches, how can we reform our mission movement. They start listening to these kids who have been over there, have these connections and have these bona fides because they're essentially channeling, translating the messages from Eduardo Mudlan, who's now president of frelimo, people like Emil Car Cabral. And I'll just add one last thing. One of the reasons why they have this legitimacy is because people like Eduardo Mudlan already have the ear of some of these more senior folks. Eduardo Mundlan is this fascinating figure. He kind of went through that Lisbon group, but he actually ended up coming to the United States, getting a degree from Oberlin College here in Ohio with religious funding. He married an American woman, was, was locally involved in, in the kind of civil rights organizing and its connections with Africa in the 1950s, and then got a PhD under Melville Herskovitz before going back and becoming this president of frelimo. And so when these kids are saying, hey, you know, we need to listen to these nationalist movements, it's easier for them to make the case because Eduardo Mulan is this familiar figure and he's also saying the same thing things. We need your help, we need your support. You need to support our nationalist revolutions. And so when it's coming from both the youth and coming from this trusted figure like Eduardo Mulan, these, these religious institutions are more likely to go along with it. And so we start seeing this real change where, where not just at this kind of youth grassroots level, but at this kind of more influential civil society level, people's attitudes start changing, and that leads to new opportunities to kind of cultivate relationships with congressmen and even, to some extent, the executive branch.

B

That's really interesting to see that kind of trajectory develop. But something I'd love to pick up on is that kind of brief mention you just made there of when he was in Ohio at Oberlin, you know, oh, some civil rights organizing. It's like, yeah, okay, that clearly has to be part of the picture of all of this. So can we talk about not just African American support kind of in that sort of realm of like, I suppose, small groups of doing organizing? Because you, you talk about that, but you also talk about more mass African American support developing for these independent struggles. So when and why does that happen?

A

Yeah, so, I mean, that's, that's again, this interesting kind of evolution that happens. There's African American support going, you know, all the way back. That's one of the, the original constituencies. There's a, there's not an automatic, but there's, there's a slightly more natural connection between civil rights and, and kind of international freedom struggles and, and decolonization. And I'll give you one interesting example. So Eduardo Mulan involved with some of these civil rights things and, and Andrew Young, Andy Young, the, the kind of famous civil rights organizer, very close to Martin Luther King, later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. When Andy Young was really young, he, he describes himself as kind of this angry, angry youth. He, before he kind of adopted, you know, the, the King principles of nonviolence and things like that. He describes himself as being kind of frustrated. He wanted to be a little bit more milt in his politics. And he apparently actually was at a retreat in the 1950s with Eduardo Mulan and Ed Maran, kind of convinced him that non violence was the best way to, to achieve these goals. And, and he's this more mature African nationalist trying to not just, you know, free his local community or achieve equal rights, but, you know, free his nation. And so this was very impactful on Andy Young, and he actually credits him partially with, you know, the, this, this evolution he went to embracing political organizing and nonviolent action. And so then when Mudlan's willing to accept the, the violence of a revolution that's again, something that, that they kind of have to, to deal with. And, and it's a, again an evolution that happens with these, both civil rights activists and church groups kind of accepting that idea that, that violence occasionally has a, has a role to play, especially in these different contexts. But going back to the African American question, you have. So, yeah, so there are always these small connections. I mean, we have the Diggs example, we have people like Andy Young, we have an activist named Prexi Nesbitt who just had a book published about him by Martha Biondi, who gets very involved and actually goes over and works in the Mozambique Institute, which is Frelimo's kind of exiled social services training facility. So there's a lot of kind of individual participation. But there was actually frustration both, both from the nationalists, from activists in the United States that there wasn't a bigger voice or an organized voice from African Americans. Because for better or worse, there's always this kind of assumption in American politics that for a nation to, or for, for any kind of cause, to international cause, to, to be legitimate, it has to be supported by that kind of ethnic group that supports it. And African Americans clearly have a very complex relationship to the African continent. They've, many of them have been in the United States for generations. It's, it's not always clear what that connection is, but there's often this assumption that for issues of Africa to be important, you need African Americans involved with it. And that assumption kind of existed here too. There was an effort to kind of organize the, the big civil rights voices, the, you know, Martin Luther Kings, you know, the Whitney Youngs, those kind of folks to, to speak out in favor of African freedom, which of course they did it, but, but those efforts to organize something and really connect these, these separate movements into one cohesive Pan African movement, they kind of fizzled out in, in the middle 1960s. A lot of those civil rights group really wanted, they didn't want to complicate the narrative around civil rights. They wanted to focus on civil rights in the United States and then they would use that power to, to benefit African countries. But beginning with the black power movements in the late 1960s, you see a much more direct identification. You start seeing groups like the Black Panthers who are actively seeking to learn from these revolutions, if not necessarily the armed elements. There's often that kind of rhetoric, but that's not often the, the model that they're trying to copy. Rather, what they're trying to copy is the ideas of self respect and rediscovering Self respect of communal, self determination, communal control of resources, and that social organizing that can kind of build up these new societies and create, you know, black wealth and black success. And so you see these. These Black power groups are really gravitating towards Southern Africa in particular, but especially Lusophone Africa, because these are the active revolutions. People like Emil Car Cabral are, you know, being trumpeted by, among other things, TRI Continental magazine as these real, you know, great thinkers of the African revolutionary movement. Movement. And so Black power, I mean, the Black Panthers get behind this, so do other Black Power organizations. And we really see this come to a head in the early 1970s after the Gary Convention, the national black political convention that happens in Gary, Indiana. And this is an attempt to unite African Americans into a more coherent political force of the United States, trying to connect the grassroots level, represented by Amiri Baraka, with a kind of local political level, represented by Mayor Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, with the national level, who's actually chaired at this convention by Charles Diggs. And each of these different levels is divided amongst themselves with different ideas. They're competing against each other. They all have different concerns at that, you know, grassroots, local and national level. And so it's really hard to kind of unite these different groups together. And one of the things that actually does unite them is supporting African liberation. And so what we see is that Lusophone Africa becomes this rallying point after 1972 to try to create this coherence, convergence, cooperation among these various black political groups as they're trying to advance this agenda that they've sketched out or they've tried to sketch out in Gary, Indiana. And the direct result of that is something called African Liberation Day, which had been kind of celebrated piecemeal variously around the country, but becomes this big annual celebration beginning in 1972. And there's a big rally in Washington, D.C. that attracts probably tens of thousands, over 10,000, certainly African Americans from across the country to celebrate African Liberation Day. And this is actually a direct request from Folimo. There'd be a number of African Americans who were actually. There was a group that was creating a film. There was another guy who was going and trying to learn from Julius Niere and Tanzania. They. They. They connected with Ferlimo and for Limo, actually took them behind the lines into Mozambique where this revolution was happening. And they said, how can we support, you know, this freedom struggle for you? And they said, what you can do is go back to the United States and organize and change the position of your government. And so that's what they did. And this idea of African Liberation Day celebrated across the country, but especially in Washington D.C. that was the big one, was going to start from Malcolm X Park, have this big march over of, you know, over 10,000 African Americans. And they were going to protest at the South African embassy, at the Rhodesian. It's kind of like a consulate, it was an information office and also the Portuguese embassy. And then they close with this big rally on the National Mall where there are these calls to protest Gulf Oil, which is the biggest US Corporation operating in Angola, that's paying a lot of money for oil rights to the Portuguese government. And this is the beginning of this annual celebration. It's even bigger in 1973. There are events scattered all across the country. Dozens of events in places like Houston, San Francisco, New Haven, Atlanta, all the Nashville, all these different places that are celebrating African Liberation Day and really rallying around Lusophone Africa in particular, but also anti apartheid Zimbabwe and liberation, these other things as well. And it's an attempt to create this distinct black political movement. And I'll just add one thing before including is that this is kind of the fascinating thing about New Left internationalism is it's not one group. It's actually all these different groups, groups that are translating these calls for solidarity with the global south, solidarity with Africa, solidarity with Lusophone Africa to these different constituencies. But just because they're, they're kind of piecemeal, it doesn't mean they're not working towards the same direction. There's actually a lot of collaboration going on between these predominantly white religious groups, these, these kind of New left lefty groups that are, are often interracial but, but lean white and these kind of, you know, more black power groups. There's a lot of overlaps in terms of membership. There's certainly an overlap in terms of the information that they're sharing back and forth with each other. And there's often collaboration when relationships are good in individual places around things like joint boycotts of Gulf Oil stations with, you know, a predominantly white group and a group associated with African Liberation Day who are working together to advance this boycott partially by appealing to different constituencies and having legitimacy with different constituencies while organizing for the same general goals. And, and this decentralization of this movement and New Left internationalism more generally, I think has hidden it from a lot of historians. But if you look at, if you look at my, my book, I have a map that shows all the different cities these things were happening. And it was a really, really big movement in the early 1970s, but because it was happening around groups that were 20 or 30 or 100, you know, here and there, don't always share the same name, don't always have the same meetings. It hasn't gained that level of attention that something like Students for a Democratic Society have. Right. Sds, because that's a, that's an easy name. That's an easy organization with a lot of kind of, you know, satellite groups, rather. These are a bunch of different groups that are all collaborating in the same direction, but often appealing and including memberships from different institutions.

B

Yeah, that's definitely an interesting element of this. And also how the kind of different domestic political concerns also are kind of uniting around this. That's intriguing, too. But one aspect shaping US Domestic political thinking at this point that we haven't fully put into that mix you've just described is, of course, the US Engagement with Vietnam. So how is that working in this US Political thinking, for instance, towards Angola?

A

Yeah, so the, the Vietnam issue is really interesting. So I, this is in many ways a. A Vietnam story. I, I literally got hired at Ohio State. They're like, can you teach the Vietnam class? I'm like, yeah, I got it. But, but, but, yeah, Vietnam is important here because I think one of the things that Vietnam does is it really scrambles the politics of this era. It really opens up an opportunity for a lot of this rethinking to begin. We have the origins of, you know, the churches, for instance, rethinking their engagement with the Global south, going all the way back to the 1950s. But, but Vietnam really kind of explodes the myth or even the reality of that Cold War consensus. And it allows for a, for a kind of new imagining of what kind of U.S. engagement with the global south, with the wider world could be. And, and you have, you know, a real sense that, like, hey, communist groups might not all be bad and they might not actually be communist. Right. So it's, it's encouraging that New Left internationalism to, to really flourish among the, the kind of frustrated youth that exist in the United States. It's encouraging New Left ideas to kind of make their way into institutions like, you know, individual Protestant churches who are, you know, rethinking their, their support for, you know, American kind of Cold War liberalism. And it, of course, you know, makes African Americans angry because, you know, some of the inequities of service, especially at the early part of the Vietnam War. So it really opens up this, this opportunity and also kind of, you know, makes it a little bit easier to accept some of this idea of liberatory violence because we're seeing that the United States isn't necessarily the, you know, fighting for. Right. In the way that we thought it was. And so that allows people to see this. This resistance to it as potentially a space for, you know, a just movement to exist. Right. Defending these people from an unjust war either launched by the United States or in this case, launched by Portugal.

C

And.

A

But the other thing that happens here is, again, I kind of alluded to it with the Congress thing is we start seeing folks coming in who are willing to challenge that Cold War consensus at the political level. We have the Vietnam generation of congressmen who are running specifically opposed to Vietnam, opposed to intervention, and, and very much in favor of rethinking American relations with the global South. So we have a whole lot of these folks who start coming in in 1970, 72, 74, with these elections, who are willing to kind of join Charles Diggs in questioning some of the stuff and advancing policies that might isolate Portugal, even at one point trying to overturn or block the treaty, a renegotiation of the treaty that gives us access to these Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic as an attempt to prevent money from going to Portugal. And so we see this really cohering. But one of the things that happens is the. The revolutions themselves actually toppled the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. It has almost nothing to do with American pressure and everything to do with the fact that especially the war in. In Guinea Bissau and secondarily Mozambique is going quite well for the nationalists. And so they're able to get essentially a youth generation in Portugal to say, we don't want to fight this war very much looks like the Vietnam generation of the United States, but they actually toppled the dictatorship in a. In a bloodless coup and replace it with a new government that then. Then says, hey, we're going to decolonize in 1975. But one of the things that the nationalists and their allies in the United States had been warning about all the way since the 1960s is essentially saying, hey, we don't want our countries, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, to be new Vietnams, where the United States just goes in and replaces that old imperial power like it did for France and Vietnam. And it warned that if the United States gets nervous about the. These leftist, seemingly communist governments coming into power, that it might, in fact do that because it is still fighting the Cold War. And so after this decolonization process goes in, there's. There's a wariness, especially among these American activists that we're afraid something's going to happen. And in 1975 in Angola there's a transition of power to Frelimo because it's essentially the only party in Mozambique. Same thing with the PIGC in both Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde. But in Angola it's contested between the mpla, between Holden Roberto's group and between another group under the leadership of a guy named Jonas Savimbi. And Savimbi and Roberto say they're anti communist. Communist. They stand for various slippery things, but the big thing you need to know about them is they're anti communists. And they actually win the support of the United States, of the American ally Mobutu says I Seiko in the Congo or Zaire at the time, and also from South Africa, which is very concerned about having a leftist, eventually communist government in Angola take over. So they all kind of unite against the mpla. The MPLA appeals for Cuban assistance and the Cubans convinced the Soviets to come in as well. So we actually have a Cold War standoff going in, going on in Angola. And there's COVID support, the Ford administration, Henry Kissinger sending COVID support through the Congo to Jonas Savimbi and to Holden Roberto to try to essentially create a stalemate in Angola that prevents the MPLA from taking over and ideally would have the, the anti communist win and setting up a government. So this is happening, so this, this warning that the nationals have had for years that the United States is going to get involved when decolonization hence actually happens. And what we see is all of these different threads that, that I've been assembling throughout the book kind of come together here. You have activists who bring this to the attention of congressional actors. In this case Dick Clark, who's a senator from Iowa, junior senator. The only person who's more junior than him is Joe Biden actually. And Joe Biden actually is on the, is on the African subcommittee with him and, and they have a kind of fun relationship that came out in some interviews. But Dick Clark decides he's going to investigate what's going on in Angola himself. He actually goes to various countries in Southern Africa, gets the sense that, hey, you know what the, the administration is telling us about how much support is going to Jonas Ofimbi and Holden Roberto. They're under reporting. There's more going on here than they're admitting to us. He comes back to the United States and starts trying to make a ruckus in the Congress about what's going on here. He's supported by activists who are writing op eds, who are sharing information with reporters. And eventually we have first a Clark amendment and then a second amendment from a California guy named John Tunney who's running for re election and trying to kind of shore up his liberal bona fides. They both introduce legislation that blocks the administration from using any money to support anti communists in Angola without getting prior approval from Congress. And this is very much a post Vietnam kind of moment. Vietnam literally has just fallen. Saigon has just fallen. Earlier in the year there was an attempt to try to rush American aid to Saigon to prop up that government. It had failed in the Congress. And there's a real question, all right, we actually have a true Cold War intervention. We have Cuban troops being airlifted in by the Soviets to Angola. This is an escalation like we've never seen. We've never seen that kind of thing happen before where the Soviets are actually doing this. They're portrayed as shock troops of the Soviet Union. If you've ever seen the original Red dawn, that's the same thing that happens in, in that little Colorado town. But so this is a, this is a real Cold War moment. And there's a question of, of how is the United States going to react to this. Daytone seems to be falling apart. Henry Kissinger they're not American troops on the ground. There's just money going in here. It seems like a relatively measured response to what's going on, but the Congress says no, we're not, we're not going to do this. We're going to block this because one, we don't want another Vietnam. This is the argument made to a lot of undecided people. But there's a real group of kind of new left, internationalist leaning congressmen who also say, hey, this isn't the relationship we're supposed to have with the global South. We need to be more supportive. We need to solve these issues through diplomatic things and we need to have an open hand. We're willing to work with some of these seemingly leftist governments to help them kind of, you know, build up their countries and that'll be the best way to kind of keep them out of the grips of the Soviet Union. So these Clark and Tunney amendments pass. Diggs and Andy Young, who's now a congressman, actually help usher it through in the House. But these, these, the Tunney amendment and the Clark amendment essentially end this intervention in Angola, much to the anger of Henry Kissinger and the Ford administration. Also a number of conservatives who think this is A real Cold War watershed, and we need to do something about it. And the Clark Amendment actually prevents any money covertly or overtly being used to support anti communists in Angola in perpetuity, going all the way from. For two, three, ten decades, however long, you know, this legislation is on the books. It says it's not that it can't be used at all, but the. The administration has to come to the Congress and say, this is why we're doing it, and give a justification. So it bars any money from being used in Angola without the Congress specifically voting to authorize that. And that essentially keeps the United States out of Angola in many ways until 1985 when that legislation is finally repealed.

B

Well, for listeners who tuned into this thinking that Lusophone Africa would be sort of of a slightly, you know, niche topic, I think you've disproved that.

A

Right.

B

We've talked about civil rights, we've talked about religion, we've talked about the Cold War, we've talked about Vietnam. I mean, there's really so many threads here and obviously so many more details in the book, too. But at the risk of going on for, you know, 12 hours, we should probably bring this discussion to a close. But what, may I ask, are you working on now that this book is out in the world?

A

Yeah, so there are a couple of things I'm working on. So the, the big one. Well, there are two projects I'm really bad at focusing. I sometimes tell people I have kind of academic add. There's always some kind of, like, shiny object I want to go play with. But there are two kind of things. One is, in some ways, I'm doing kind of the conservative response to this. One of the things I always say is that, you know, the Cold War consensus didn't kind of end, and then we had some kind of new consensus. One of the things I argue for, and maybe we'll have some time to talk about big takeaways from this look, but one of the things I kind of argue for is that, you know, there was a much more vibrant New Left, but it was often competing with that New Right that's kind of more familiar from the historiography. And that New Right was also very much engaged with Africa. It was, it looked at not just Angola, but some of the larger southern African issues as kind of a shibboleth. It used these Southern African issues as a way to kind of define its global politics. And there was a transnational dimension, too, in the sense that both South Africa and Rhodesia were also engaged with the kind of global nation branding, political management and grassroots organizing that both Portugal and the Lusophone nationalists were. And so the second book looks at that kind of conservative internationalism that. That has elements of white supremacy, that has elements of kind of a global Cold War, and has elements of. How do we define that, that kind of Western identity in the world? And in the same way that the New Left is composed of a lot of kind of competing ideas that kind of merge together, so too is this. This conservative internationalism where you have these very different ideas of, say, how Rhodesia fits into an international conservative imagination. And they're competing with each other to kind of of inform the growth of this movement. And it gets into some very kind of complex political identity ideas that. That are still kind of, you know, part of what's. What we're grappling with today. And so I want to look at that. The other one's a little bit more fun, a little bit. I'm still not quite sure what's going. But the other one's looking at this idea of American national mission through pop culture and all the different ways that Americans kind of imbibe this idea of what the United States should be doing in the world. And so I'm at comic books like Captain America, I'm looking at films like Red dawn and pretty much anything with Chuck Norris in it, and trying to figure out, you know, how Americans conceptualize what the United States should be doing the world, where it should be doing things, and what specific forms of engagement it should be adopting and how we kind of imbibe those and have these. These buzzwords and references and cultural expectations that make it easier for the United States to intervene. Intervene willy nilly, as it will around the world.

B

Well, definitely two projects that'll keep you busy. But do we want to finish with a brief sort of takeaway of the book we've been discussing?

A

Yeah, that would be great. So, yeah. So, I mean, I think there are a couple kind of big themes that I think come out of this book, both for the United States, also globally. I mean, I think one of the big things that I always tell people, one of the goals of my scholarship, is that decolonization really did have this transformative effect, not just on the globe, but I think on societies as well. It reordered the international system, but it also reordered a lot of these. These societies in the United States, in Europe, that. That engage with this process of decolonization, either you know, willingly or in some cases, unwillingly. And, you know, Arnie Westad talks about the Cold War as kind of canalizing post colonial politics. Right. In the Global south, they're forced to kind of fit their local concerns and complaints into either the US or Soviet models of modernization. But I actually think the opposite is in some way true too, that these there were Global south ideas that really guided and motivated internal challenges to the US status quo, to the Cold War consensus, to the way that countries operated around the world. And we see Americans really using Lusophone Africa as a way to kind of understand their own evolving politics. Right? So this is really a two way street street. It's not just that the Cold War is canalizing and directing, you know, Global south politics, but Global south ideas and decolonization are also in some ways doing the same thing in the United States. And this really allows one of the things that, that some, some of my colleagues have been talking about, people like Frank Garrett's have said, you know, hey, we have these, we have all these African ideas, these African thinkers, but we don't often think of them as truly global thinkers, workers outside of maybe a fanon who's, you know, technically from the Caribbean. But, but if we do, we need to really take them seriously, not only for the effect that they had in African politics, but global politics. And so in some ways that's what I'm trying to do is using Emil Garcia Brawl, using Eduardo, saying, hey, this is how their ideas really operated in the United States and in some of these other contexts, because these really were universal thinkers in a way that they need to be put at the same level as, you know, some of these Americans, American policymakers, or, you know, a canon or something like that. The other thing is, I think this New Left internationalism is, is really important because it not only explains the kind of larger impact of these politics that I don't think ended, you know, with the late 1960s, early 1970s, but it shows that there was a real vibrancy. But I think in order to, to understand that, we need to recognize the nature of New Left internationalism and New Left politics that is authentic and decentralized and has all these different constituencies, but they often collaborate together in some really, at times effective ways, at times problematic ways. And so we need to look at these movements and, and the common ideas that they would unite around. And they were often uniting around things like the anti apartheid movement, environmental politics, all these things. And, and they're often treated kind of separately, like here's a movement here, here's a movement there. But that's certainly not how people conceptualized at the time, there was overlapping memberships, there was collaboration. I. One of the things that I found when I was researching is there's an anti intervention phone tree and it has like 15 different groups that are all concerned with like, different specific, you know, Latin America, Philippines, human rights, these kind of things. But they all knew each other and they literally would call each other whenever they had information to pass it along. And it shows just how organized some of this stuff was, was. And I've also talked with activists who said, yeah, you know, I mean, we technically had different groups, but we sometimes operate in the same buildings. We shared phone lists, we'd have pizza parties where we'd all get together from all these different groups and stuff, envelopes together. So we, and we go to each other's protests. So we may not have been like formal members of that organization, but we were supporting them, we were working for them. And, and I think that shows a real vibrancy to the left that I think is sometimes lost with this rise of the New Right. And clearly I'm not trying to replace that or challenge that, but actually I think there's more of a competition between these New Left ideas and these New Right ideas. And there's a real vibrancy in this competition going all the way through the 1980s and into the 1990s. And we see things like the, the Boland Amendments with limit, you know, Reagan's support for the contras happening literally a year after the second one happens. A year after the Clark Amendment is repealed, appealed, and that same year after the Clark Amendment was peeled, we have the Comprehensive Anti Apartheid Act. So how do we understand these policies that seem to almost be contradicting each other? Well, one of the ways we do it is we understand it's a competition. There are these New Left congressmen, they're these New Right congressmen, and they're often competing for the votes of people who are kind of undecided in the middle. And this vibrancy of the New Left, you can see it happening not just in Congress, in the kind of, you know, anti militarization discussions are happening in the 1990s. But you can see things like the Battle for Seattle, which is very much, much this kind of New Left internationalist reaction to neoliberal politics. And so there's a real vibrancy of both right and left going on in the 1980s and 1990s all the way, I'd say, up until, you know, 9, 11, when there's a kind of new consensus that at least temporarily replaces that, that period of competition over, you know, what role the United States should play in the world in terms of human rights, in terms of supporting, you know, equity internationally, in terms of environmental politics, all that stuff.

B

Stuff.

A

There's a, there's a much deeper extended debate that happens there. And I, I don't think we've done as well as historians of recovering that. And there's really, you know, vibrant, different leftist politics coming from African Americans, coming from youth who, who get a little bit older, even from the churches as well. You know, there's a fairly vibrant left church politics going well into the 1990s that if you talk to activists, they, they, they, they know it's there. They got support from it, they got money from it, but we don't see that represented as well as the literature. So it's, it's a, it's a much messier story, but I think it's a much more interesting story of American politics and of American internationalism than we've traditionally talked about.

B

Well, for people who want more messiness, they can, of course, go read the book for all the additional details. The book is titled Dream the Size of Freedom, How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Joe, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

A

Yeah. And, Miranda, thank you so much. And thanks, everyone, for listening.

C

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