The dialectic had stopped: Black Radicals and the End of History, 1968-1989 34 views

In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars across the humanities increasingly turned to questions of language, identity, and representation. Accounts of this “cultural turn” typically center on European and North American thinkers, overlooking a parallel genealogy that emerged from Black radical and anticolonial thought. This dissertation reconstructs that alternative history through the work of Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, and Stuart Hall. It argues that their turns to culture were shaped by a shared problem: the collapse of Third World projects seeking economic development and self-determination. Drawing on published writings, archival papers, correspondence, and other sources from across the Anglophone world, the dissertation situates these thinkers within the political-economic transformations of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter One contextualizes Robinson’s Black Marxism as a civilizational critique of modernization, dependency, and world-systems theory, exposing the colonial assumptions embedded in dominant accounts of capitalist development. Chapter Two examines Wynter’s early writings on Caribbean culture and nation-building, showing how she sought to reconnect the postcolonial elite with an organic folk culture in the aftermath of Jamaican decolonization. Chapter Three reinterprets Hall’s cultural politics through his engagement with the Caribbean alongside 1970s Britain, centering his UNESCO essays on postcolonial crisis, cultural resistance, and political subject formation. Together, these chapters show how Hall, Robinson, and Wynter turned to culture in response to the crisis of postcolonial sovereignty. The dissertation recovers an anticolonial inheritance at the heart of cultural studies and rethinks the cultural turn as a transnational effort to reckon with the collapse of Third World developmentalism and the defeats of the post-1968 left.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Anticolonial Thought; Postcolonial Development; Cedric Robinson; Sylvia Wynter; Stuart Hall; Political Theory; Intellectual History; Third Worldism

English

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2026-06-19