Black statecraft is key to radical and revolutionary potential – rejecting it and confusing it as an “impossible assimilation into western values” is not only incorrect but bogs down on any opportunity for black politics and liberation.

This dissertation offers black statecraft as a theoretical lens to capture a range of ideas and engagements/entanglements black people have had with the state. It rejects the idea that black actors engaged with state-making and theorizing are merely privileging Western categories and values. Black statecraft instead attunes us to the radical features of this revolutionary event of state-making in their connections to the contexts of decolonial revolutions in the social heterogeneity of the antislavery movement, a transnational/transcultural network and media sphere, and diverse practices of slave resistance. The Haitian Revolution and the founding of the first black independent nation in the Atlantic world, I argue begins a long tradition of black statecraft that extends across the United States and the Caribbean. ¶ By keeping our visions of the state (political community) and freedom in view alongside our critiques of the state, black statecraft brings attention away from a shared or unified vision of the state and freedom, and instead to a shared set of questions and problems that real world political actors face, what David Scott terms “the problem space.” As Scott (2005) defines it, the problem space is, ¶ First of all a conjunctural space, a historically constituted discursive space. This discursive conjuncture is defined by a complex of questions and answers – or better, a complex of statements, propositions, resolutions, and arguments offered in answer to largely implicit questions or problems. Or to put this another way, these statements and so on are moves in a field or space of argument, and to understand them requires reconstructing that space of problems that elicited them. ¶ To uncover the dynamics of black statecraft, I use Scott’s notion as a way of understanding and analyzing the conceptual and ideological work objects, like the state and statecraft, are meant to perform. ¶ Throughout this dissertation, I aim to make visible black political engagements with statecraft in terms of a “theory-problem.” Thinking of the state as a theory problem and statecraft as a problem-space provides an opportunity to theorize black engagements with statecraft in terms of what is viewed as a problem itself. In other words, it makes visible what the black actors under study were doing with the state, what foundations they wanted to build. At the same time, rather than explain the failures of state or ideology, I reflect on the ways in which this approach to the issue of enacting black freedom results in an antipolitical response. My main contention is that theories of the state are implicitly theories of politics. Therefore, the disavowal of the state is also a disavowal of black politics. ¶ Black statecraft, as this dissertation will illuminate is an important part of black political practice of politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through an engagement with Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and C.L.R. James, I will illustrate how responses to the state speaks to a larger problem of the possibilities of black politics in a racialized world. Engaging with these thinkers through the lens of black statecraft and attuned to their problem-space also gets to the specificity of black freedom struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries. ¶ By undervaluing the state and statecraft as a topic worthy of investigation, scholarship in political theory ignores the ways in which these black statecraft thinkers provide alternatives and innovations in state-making, bending the arc of history closer to justice. Both approaches to black freedom and the state along with the binary thinking it encourages blunts our understanding of the contours of decolonization and limits the way we view our resources in the events and thinkers of the past. ¶ This dissertation engages with the persistent and ongoing question of enacting black freedom in the context of a racialized world in the Caribbean and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. I aim to show the variety of ways black thinkers and actors reflected upon their experience through critical engagement to put forward political ideas and projects that continue to shape the ways in which we engage or choose to disengage the state, politics, and the political. ¶ I insist that we must return to these questions of founding, freedom, and the state because the state is also a site of contestation. Through an investigation of how these theorists of black statecraft engage with and theorize the state, we are better able to reflect on the areas of political contestation reshaping the way certain concepts like the state and freedom, to name a few key concepts explored in this study, are understood, and mediated. These black political thinkers provide great reflections for what we are fighting for, to give content to the kind of political-social community we seek to build upon principles of freedom, equality, and justice. My work responds to the need for reconceptualizing and expanding anticolonial politics and principles, decolonizing principles of freedom, self-determination, and autonomy. ¶ As a framework of analysis, black statecraft thus subverts statist-anti-statist binaries by holding together a critique of the state with political projects aimed toward founding a new one. Through its deconstructive critique, the black thinkers in this inquiry bring into view the relationship the state has with freedom in its vision of the new state to be built. It captures both what black people were and continue to fight against along with keeping in view what we are fighting for. ¶ Statecraft, here, is a political and ideological project of world-making in concert with others (Arendt 1958; Krause 2015; Markell 2003). There is no black allegiance to state, but perhaps allegiance to an idea of a principled, ethical state, one they shaped not one they mistakenly placed their belief – the sole creation of white Europeans. I aim to show the variety of ways blacks reflected upon their experience and put forward political ideas and projects that continue to shape the ways in which we engage or choose to disengage the state, politics, and the political. Black visions of the state and freedom provides a space to reflect on the possibilities of freedom and the modes in which we attempt to achieve it. This history offers stories and writings that become our resources for present and future political practice. ¶ In this dissertation I develop this argument through an analysis of three thinkers: Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and C.L.R. James. These thinkers, I argue, represent black statecraft thinkers that are especially positioned to hold both the critique of the destructive power of the state with liberatory visions of the state as thinkers that subvert binary-thinking on the state and state-making. They illustrate how black statecraft navigates this binary. I argue that it is valuable to reflect upon the relationship of the state suggested by these thinkers to the actualization of racial emancipation and black freedom. ¶ I demonstrate that binaries are not productive and offer black statecraft and state- making as an alternative to the statism/anti-statism dichotomy. A reinterpretation of black state-making is necessary to disclose the complicated nature of black politics in a world organized by racism. I want to both ‘deconstruct certain modalities’ of black political thought, critical race theory, and decolonial thought as well as construct a theory of black statecraft that holds together the critique and the (possibilities of) formation or foundation of the new. I tease out our understanding of the state as both a set of political, social, economic institutions of governance and an idea influencing how we envision our society, the principal foundations of government and the state, and the role of government/the state in the peoples lives. In this way, it’s important to keep in mind the state as object – as a site of contestation – and as an idea – another site of contestation.