Joyce Moore Turner passed away last year at the age of 104. To commemorate her and to reflect on the conversation I was able to have with her, I wrote this post on SX Blog: smallaxe.net/content/1304.

My article was aided enormously by a conversation I was able to have with Joyce Moore Turner in May last year.

Turner was close friends with Hermina Huiswoud and wrote the indispensable book "Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance."

aalbc.com/books/978025...

The Huiswouds not only knew, but also had partnerships, friendships, and at times feuds with none other than W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and many others.

Next to reconsidering the relationship between international Communism and anticolonial nationalism, I stress the rather extraordinary number of luminaries in the orbit of the Otto and Hermina Huiswoud.

I thus propose to think of international Communism and anticolonial nationalism as two registers in which Black radicals speak. That is, while the Huiswouds spoke in different registers in different historical moments, their substantive beliefs remained remarkably consistent.

Rather than exchanging an economic focus for a cultural one, the Huiswouds continued to address economic exploitation and emphasize international solidarity, even as their organizing took the form of Surinamese anticolonial nationalism.

Rather than being wedded to economic determinism, the Huiswouds were already concerned with anticolonialism and anti-racism during their time with the Communist International.

Faced with the difficulties of overt Communist organizing after World War II, the Huiswouds increasingly adopted an anticolonial nationalist discourse. Their overall activist objectives and outlook never substantively changed, however.

Anti-communist measures taken during the Cold War resulted in the detainment of Otto Huiswoud during WWII, and immigration difficulties for Hermina Huiswoud as a naturalized US citizen.

While international Communism and anticolonial nationalism may appear to be mutually exclusive, the trajectory of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud shows such an antithesis to be false.