Rethinking the Internal Colony: Imperial Finance and the Anti-Colonial Imaginaries

• In Event: Legacies of 1968: Emergent Transnationalisms and Recurrent Crises

Abstract

In the midst of struggles against racial oppression in the US that intensified in and around 1968, activists developed the theory of the internal colony to contend that US imperialism was essential to understanding racial oppression in the heart of empire. Texts such as Stokely Carmichael and Carles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967), Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America (1969), and Mario Barrera, Carlos Muñoz, Charles Ornelas’s “The Barrio as Internal Colony” (1972) described the conditions of colonization experienced by racial minorities living in the US. The theory of the internal colony foregrounded alliances with struggles for national liberation abroad, articulated through an internationalist and Third Worldist position. Originally used by Black Power and radical Chicano movements to critique US imperialism and develop a national consciousness, the internal colony thesis also spoke to struggles around indigenous sovereignty within the conditions of settler colonialism in North America, as well as Third Worldist feminist positions within the first world. Acknowledging its limitations, this essay is a critical evaluation of the internal colony thesis, its use and circulation within militant movements against racial oppression during the long 1960s, and its cultural and theoretical resonances today. Starting with the perspective of struggles against what has been called “extractive capitalism” and calls to “decolonize everything” articulated by contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter and in protests like Standing Rock, my analysis explores how and if the theory of the internal colony persists in the framing of contemporary social movements, if only on obliquely. Furthermore, drawing on the critiques of imperialism and finance, first developed by Lenin, that inspired movements for Third World through dependency theory from Latin American scholars and the theory of neo-colonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, I argue for a revaluation of the theory of the internal colony in the context of contemporary financialization in the US and elsewhere as a way to reinvigorate theories of geographical dislocation that remap international solidarities in struggles against financial dispossession, and particularly its racial and colonial dimensions, today.

Author

• Morgan Adamson, Macalester College