Domestic Colonialism: The Overlooked Significance of Robert L. Allen's Contributions (Critical Essay)
By The Black Scholar
- Release Date: 2010-06-22
- Genre: Social Science
Description
ROBERT L. ALLEN'S Black Awakening in Capitalist America has weathered the changing political climates since the late 1960s, both on a grassroots level and in the academy. Yet many of the lessons it provided have been lost. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate what I believe to be the overlooked contributions of Black Awakening, not only to the theory and understanding of the process of internal colonialism, but also a documentation of a transition from a largely colonial world to a mainly neocolonial one during that process. While quite a few have documented the process since it was launched, Allen documented "domestic neocolonialism" during its beginning. This paper also aims to highlight lessons that we can learn from Allen in what I hope to be simple terms. (1) Internal Colonialism as a theory has lost much of the currency that it held in the late 1960s. First I want to discuss the trajectory of internal colonialism leading into the significance of Black Awakening, and then I want to discuss Nathan Glazer's and Michael Burawoy's omission of Allen as a means of discrediting internal colonialism as a theory and its relevance to the discourse.
