The origins of the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ in African-American Communist Harry Haywood’s critical thinking: A Chronicle of a Conversation with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n35.04

Juan Vicente Iborra-Mallent
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0336-3128
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
juan.v.iborra@gmail.com

Daniel Montañez-Pico
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9660-9499
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
danielm9876@hotmail.com

Abstract:

Harry Haywood (1898-1985) was a prominent African-American communist, who –drawing from the understanding of racism as an essentially economic problem– argued that African-American population was treated as an ‘internal colony’, an idea he portrayed in his well-known work Negro Liberation (1948). However, this root of ‘internal colonialism’ notion in Black Marxisms has been disregarded by the Latin American school led by Pablo González Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who assign it to American sociologist Charles Wright Mills in late 50s. This article presents a chronicle of a conversation on this and other related issues held by Haywood’s widow and American historian Gwendolyn, an emerita professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at Rutgers University and Michigan State University.

Keywords: Harry Haywood, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, internal colonialism, black marxism.