Introduction: Public Secrets and the Archives of Black Internationalism

This essay introduces a special section on Otto and Hermine Huiswoud, Black Caribbean internationalists whose anticolonial and Communist organizing spanned several decades and continents, from Suriname and the United States to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and to Russia. Otto and Hermine Huiswoud were born in Suriname and Guyana, respectively, and would later move to the United States, becoming active members of the Communist Party of the USA. Later they moved and worked in the Netherlands. Theirs were lives of international political activism, in a shared, if sometimes conflictual project with some of the leading anti-colonial radicals of the early to mid-twentieth century, figures like Marcus Garvey and George Padmore but also leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. While the Huiswouds’ political activity is known among a small group of scholars and activists, their lives and work remain underexplored. For example, in the Netherlands, where the author writes, it was not until the founding of the Black Archives in Amsterdam in 2016 that the Huiswouds would become part of broad-scale discussions about anticolonial traditions in the Dutch Caribbean. This special section aligns with the author’s ongoing interest in Black anticolonial intellectual traditions of the Caribbean—in a project called Other Radicals—and the role of figures from the Dutch Caribbean in this project. More than an interest in the question of power and the production of silences of the archives, or of archival occlusion of Black anticolonial struggle, however, this introduction asks what it might mean to attend more rigorously to the question of secrecy. Afterall, the Huiswouds, like many other radicals who lived at the intersections of anticolonial and Marxist-Communist mobilization, lived lives shrouded by secrecy, doubly cautious of the colonial state apparatus as they were of the anti-Communist sentiments that circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century, and even today. Taking secrecy in the archives seriously, then, may enable better understanding of the freedom struggles of Black internationalists, for Blacks but also for the worker—for the Black worker.