A Culture of Solidarity

This chapter examines the politics of difference and solidarity among Latin American and Black Power radicals that challenged the exclusion of marginalized groups from the universal. Dependency theory provided an explanation for neo-colonialism and the long search for Latin America identity and solidarity. A black cultural nationalism and black history provided the motifs for establishing a sense of peoplehood and asserting God is black. A narrative in which God was partial to the oppressed offered a way for liberationists to conceptualize a new inclusive universal humanity.

Négritude or Black Cultural Nationalism

It is well known that nationalist movements are generally accompanied by parallel movements of ideas that make it possible for its leaders to mould a new image of the dominated people. And as Thomas Hodgkin has shown, the need for African political movements to ‘justify themselves’ and ‘to construct ideologies’ has been particularly strong.1 Nationalist movements were to a large extent founded upon emotional impulses, which imparted a distinctive tone to the intellectual clamour that went with them and which continue to have a clear resonance after independence.