The mid-century black Atlantic moment was diverse, fraught, and full of complicated theorizations of diaspora, identity, and the future of racialized thinking. It was at once nationalist, pan-African, pan-global South, and all sorts of mixtures and variations on those themes. With good reason: centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and segregation all fractured memory, cultural connection, and the meaning of being a part of a racial group in most, if not all, senses beyond a shared suffering of violence. So much of the mid-twentieth century in the black Atlantic was dedicated to reckoning with those centuries and gesturing, then working concretely toward some sort of repair by retrieving redeemable pasts, rethinking racial mythologies, articulating traditions and countertraditions. Few if any moments in the history of ideas have been as compelling and productive.