Anticolonial Radicals in Different Registers: On Otto and Hermina Huiswoud’s Black Communism

While Otto and Hermina Huiswoud are often remembered as foot soldiers of the Communist International (Comintern), if not as doctrinarian Stalinists, this essay proposes that such depictions misunderstand the registers in which Black radicals speak. Before World War II, the infrastructure of the Comintern enabled the Huiswouds to champion anticolonial and anti-racist causes. Following the war, the Huiswouds championed anticolonial nationalist causes, though without abandoning international solidarity and the critique of economic exploitation. The shift from international Communism to anticolonial nationalism was therefore less a shift in substance and more a shift in register. Appreciating such shifts in registers requires placing the Huiswouds in context and in relation to the Black, Communist, and Caribbean diasporic networks of which they were part; for it is only by understanding to whom Black radicals speak that scholars can begin to understand the different and context-dependent registers in which Black radicals speak.