NBN Book of the Day Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Feb 6, 2026
Dr. Leslie James, Reader in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Moving Word, explores how West African and Caribbean newspapers fueled Black political thought. Small presses became a transatlantic forum. Topics include clipping and reprinting networks, shapeshifting journalistic forms, debates across Garveyite, Marxist, and Ethiopianist lines, and how professionalization reshaped the press as independence neared.
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Newspapers As Engines Of Black Internationalism
- Newspapers in the 1930s–40s were central sources for Black internationalist debate and political thought.
- Leslie James used newspapers to trace how Black internationalism spread across the Atlantic networks.
The Fourth And Only Estate
- Colonized newspapers self-identified as the "fourth and only estate" to claim democratic voice under colonial rule.
- That claim framed newspapers as the sole public sphere available to colonized peoples and an anti-colonial institution.
Clipping As Political Infrastructure
- Excluded from metropolitan resources, Black papers relied on clipping, reprinting, and informal exchange to build content.
- These practices doubled as political networks that bypassed colonial information control.
