Dream the Size of Freedom - (Power, Politics, and the World) by R Joseph Parrott (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s

Dream the Size of Freedom explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as the Vietnam War drew to a close. These Portuguese African liberation movements, led by nationalists like Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral, built global solidarity networks to support their military and social challenges to empire while defending against Western intervention. US activists disillusioned with the Cold War came to see African self-determination as central to global campaigns for racial and economic justice. A broad coalition ranging from Black Power radicals to religious liberals mobilized against the North Atlantic alliance with Portugal. In the process, this grassroots movement helped define a New Left Internationalism that championed decentralized, multiracial organizing and a collaborative vision of US foreign policy to redress historic inequalities between Global North and South.

Drawing on more than fifty oral histories and research in government and activist archives on three continents in English, Portuguese, French, and Afrikaans, R. Joseph Parrott reconstructs the transnational anti-imperial network that injected Global South priorities into US political debates. Popular protests and informational campaigns led to collaborations with legislators eager to constrain the powerful executive branch. In 1976, this grassroots-legislative alliance halted Gerald Ford's anti-communist intervention against the Soviet-backed government of newly independent Angola. This victory of New Left Internationalist ideas anticipated future anti-apartheid and Latin American peace movements while also fueling a conservative revival of Cold War containment. By exploring US engagement with the contested process of African decolonization, Dream the Size of Freedom highlights the origins of two contrasting visions of American foreign policy that defined debates over the country's proper role in the Global South into the 1990s.

Review Quotes

"In Dream the Size of Freedom, R. Joseph Parrott has provided a groundbreaking history of liberation movements in Lusophone Africa during the 1960s and 1970s and how they fostered unprecedented cooperation across racial, generational, and ideological lines among US activists and political organizers. His compelling analysis of 'grassroots diplomacy' highlights African nationalist groups like FRELIMO and its communication, collaboration, and common cause with American religious humanists, young radicals, and civil rights activists to create lasting networks of solidarity that prioritized racial equality, cultural authenticity, and democratic participation over US Cold War imperatives--a distinctive New Left Internationalism--and that helped dismantle the final vestiges of formal European colonial rule in Africa."-- "Benjamin Talton, Howard University"

"In one of the most important books on Black internationalism to appear in decades, R. Joseph Parrott meticulously charts the anti-imperialist projects and alliances that consistently challenged the imposition of a Cold War framework on their independent visions. Showing how battles over different visions of global politics played out in the US Congress, Parrott restores a critical emphasis on politics to remind us of what was at stake in Cold War era anti-imperialism."-- "Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia"

"This is a brilliant work, one of the best accounts in years of the complex interactions between anticolonial and liberation movements in the decolonizing world and the dynamic, evolving, decentralized activist politics they helped to pioneer. Creatively argued, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Dream the Size of Freedom is wholly original in its portrayal of the singular impact of Southern African militancy on the radicalization of the American left."-- "Bradley R. Simpson, University of Connecticut"

About the Author

R. Joseph Parrott is Assistant Professor of History at the Ohio State University.