The Abeng ’ s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

: This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place-making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.


Abeng
An editorial in issue one of the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng described the journal's desired function: its contributors and readership consciously adopted this subjectivity with the paper running a regular "sufferer's diary" that printed the accounts of the daily struggles faced by Jamaican sufferers. Abeng represented a key mechanism through which spatial-political formations, both material and imagined, could be directed to recognise the aims of Black Power in Jamaica, the Black Atlantic, and "Third World" (Gilroy 1993). Abeng became a forum and amplifying voice for Jamaica's impoverished Black masses and this would directly influence the political praxis and imaginaries developed through the paper. Abeng operated as a material linkage between variously placed sufferer activities in Jamaica. Abeng's outlook was transnational, the paper and its commentators frequently articulated local struggles within a global political analysis.
Abeng emerges from the social and political ferment of the late 1960s in Jamaica. This was galvanised in 1968 by the expulsion of Guyanese Black Power theorist and University of the West Indies (UWI) historian Walter Rodney from the island and the subsequent urban insurrection in Kingston and government crackdown on university students and urban youth (Scott and Hill 1999;Scott and Lewis 2001). After the "riots", regular meetings began taking place on the UWI campus in Kingston between, primarily, radical students and left-wing academics. Former editor Robert Hill recounts that unionised workers and Rastafari were also in attendance (Scott and Hill 1999). From these meetings crystallised a desire for a newspaper that would critique post-independence society, culture, and politicaleconomy holistically and would combine this with agitation (Scott and Post 1998). Giving Jamaican sufferers a voice and building links to their communities through the paper's distribution and circulation (Scott and Lewis 2001).
Abeng was ideologically heterogenous, emerging from various grievances articulated by a wide range of groups variously positioned within post-independence Jamaican society. There was a strong Rastafari and Black culturalist tendency (Scott and Hill 1999;Scott and Post 1998) that represented a certain politicisation of Rastafari and its critiques of cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism. There was a strong current of Jamaican radical nationalism rooted in thinkers of West Indian nationhood such as C.L.R. James. This trend was exemplified in Abeng's persistent coverage of the region's radical history of rebellion and anti-colonial uprisings. This tendency was strongly rooted in the UWI campus in Kingston and the dependency theorising of Caribbean academics such as George Beckford and Norman Girvan (Scott and Post 1998). Lastly, there was a socialist and Marxist tendency with this being influenced by Third World socialisms. Notable in the Caribbean context is the Cuban Revolution but also important was the impact of Left struggles for national liberation in Africa and the war in Vietnam (Scott and Lewis 2001). There were also more orthodox Marxist-Leninist figures involved with their work often sitting in tension with the Black culturalist or nationalist trends in Abeng.

Aims and Structure
I am concerned with Abeng's combination of more placed sufferer struggles against the continued coloniality of life (Mignolo and Walsh 2018;Quijano 2000) in Jamaica with a global anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analysis. Using Abeng, I draw together scholarship on Black Geographies and Black internationalist spatial politics to interrogate the material and imagined spatial articulations forged through Abeng and the movement surrounding it. Work on Black Geographies allows for analysis of the enclosing articulations of plantation space-time (McKittrick 2011(McKittrick , 2013) that various emancipatory struggles in Jamaica contested. The focus in Black Geographies scholarship on place-making practices allows for examination of how Black peoples were able to reclaim places within plantation space (McKittrick 2011). Black internationalist 2 studies, particularly political geographical engagements, provide a framework for analysing the internationalist imaginaries and solidarities constructed through Abeng. Here I contribute to political geographic studies of articulations of internationalism from below (Featherstone 2013; Jazeel and Legg 2019). I highlight the situated articulation of internationalist politics and seek to answer questions of how and where the international is imagined and constructed (Hodder 2015;Hodder et al. 2015;Legg 2014). Co-relatedly, I attempt to resolve the question of how Black placemaking efforts can be understood in relation across time and space.
The central contribution of this paper lies in drawing together these two fields. I examine how various place-making projects enabled through Abeng were connected to broader Black internationalist networks and imaginaries. The extensive scholarship on Black internationalism and its spatial politics is used to examine how place-making projects are connected within broader transnational movements (Hodder 2016;West et al. 2009). This allows for an interrogation of the interrelated nature of the predominant scales, broadly interpreted, through which much of the Black Geographies and Black internationalist literature operates. The oftentimes small-scale, enclosed, and intimate spaces of the plantation, ghetto, etc. that characterises Black Geographies scholarship (Bledsoe and Wright 2019) can be understood in relation to the transnational relations that frame Black internationalist studies (Edwards 2003;Putnam 2009;West et al. 2009).
The following theoretical section engages with Black Geographies scholarship (Bledsoe and Wright 2019), conceptions of plantation space (Beckford 2000), and Black place-making practices (McKittrick 2011). This is drawn together with Black internationalist work to position Jamaica and Abeng within broad histories of Black internationalism (Putnam 2009;West et al. 2009). I then focus on spatial political analysis of Black internationalist networks (Featherstone 2015;Hodder 2016). The empirical section covers Abeng's politics of grounding (Rodney 1969) enabled through the paper's production and circulation. The empirical discussion closes on the articulation of such placed activities within broader Black internationalist networks constituted through Abeng.

Black Geographies and Black Internationalism in Dialogue
Famed Trinidadian historian and theoretician C.L.R. James (1989) saw Modernity as the founding experience of the Caribbean. For James, the history of the West Indies was governed by the dual institutions of chattel slavery and the sugar The Abeng's Call 115 plantation. The plantation and its racial logics are the structure through which an "originally" Modern social, economic, and political structure emerged in the Caribbean: Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of the word, but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallel anywhere else. (James 1989:391-392) Many West Indian scholars contend that the manifold legacies of racial slavery and colonial rule, grounded in colonialist ontologies of race, still powerfully shape West Indian life with independence a wasted opportunity in challenging this coloniality (Kamugisha 2007(Kamugisha , 2019Meeks and Girvan 2010;Thame 2011).
Aaron Kamugisha (2007Kamugisha ( , 2019 and Maziki Thame (2011Thame ( , 2017 analyse the coloniality of citizenship in Jamaica and the failures of post-independence decolonisation. The dominant culture of West Indian politics and governance post-WWII is often characterised as Creole nationalist (Kamugisha 2007;Thame 2017). Quoting Hintzen (2004:113): Creole nationalism left intact the racial order underpinning colonialism while providing the ideological basis for national "coherence". It left unchallenged notions of a "natural" racial hierarchy.
The West Indian political establishment was dominated by the middle class who attained their position historically through deference to the British colonial state (James 1971). Important here was the racial stratification of British West Indian colonial society; a racialised social hierarchy meant that the middle class of the region tended to be of mixed racial origin. Brown or Creole West Indians were thought to be biologically closer to whiteness and thus better inculcated into European Modernity and civilisation (Bogues 2002). In Jamaica, nationalist leaders and governments constructed citizenship and the new nation through "Creoleness", meaning that national belonging was rooted in a colonial racial identity that the majority of Black Jamaicans sat outside of (Thame 2017). Creole nationalism's anti-colonial ambitions extended to little more than the removal of white colonial officials blocking the advancement of the middle class and the capture of the colonial state's structures by West Indians (Kamugisha 2019). Therefore, a generation of critical West Indian academics who came of age during formal decolonisation conceived of the West Indies as a plantation system even after independence (Girvan 2010).
These Jamaican class relations of course impacted Abeng. Whilst the paper was a forum for political discussion from below and a means for connecting sufferer struggles across the island these aims sometimes ran up against the paper's often brown, middle-class "leadership". Towards the end of Abeng's production run the desire for a "coherent" ideological line would see intellectual authority exerted by elements of the middle-class editorial leadership (Scott and Lewis 2001). This was a move towards a Marxist class-analysis that was rather dismissive of Black culturalist, Rastafari, and Jamaican radical nationalist tendencies represented in Abeng. This claimed intellectual authority was rooted in the material benefits bestowed by a position in the Jamaican middle class which allowed attainment of higher education and thus intellectual "superiority". These class tensions within Abeng perhaps affirming Walter Rodney's position that the Black intelligentsia must become "servants of the black masses" (Rodney 1969:32) or else remain complicit with a white-imperialist system of intellectual production.
Returning to the plantation, McKittrick's (2013) use of the plantation analytic for assessing the production and articulation of racialised space emerges from a depth of earlier Caribbean scholarship and draws directly on George Beckford's studies (1971Beckford's studies ( , 1972Beckford's studies ( , 2000. In Beckford's (1972Beckford's ( , 2000 theorising of plantation capitalism, Black dispossession represents an essential and persistent feature. In the plantation mode of production the "basic contradiction between capital and labour has a specific African vs European (black-white) confrontation" (Beckford 2000:327) with race and class oppression mapping on to one another in plantation societies. Despite historical re-workings of this basic contradiction through emancipation, decolonisation, etc. it is the continued dispossession of the mass of Black peoples that sees the perpetuation of plantation relations. Postemancipation, however, Beckford identifies the emergence of an "Afro-Saxon" or "mulatto" middle class that forms the neo-colonial national bourgeoisie after independence and whose integration with metropolitan capital allows them to maintain their position of class-rule (ibid.). McKittrick's (2011McKittrick's ( , 2013 later geographical analyses of plantation space are indebted to Beckford's (1972) extensive theorisations of the plantation and Caribbean dependency economics. Beckford was a central figure in the New World Group of Caribbean scholars in the 1960s and one of the foremost political-economists of the West Indies in the 1970s. Producing foundational texts such as Persistent Poverty (Beckford 1972) and advising Michael Manley's Jamaican government, Beckford was also central Abeng's establishment and early theoretical direction (Hill 2007;Scott and Post 1998). McKittrick (2011McKittrick ( , 2013 views the plantation as the paradigmatic geographical exemplar of the various practices of spatialised violence directed against Black peoples in the Americas. The logics and racial-economy of the plantation enforced Black place-lessness, as McKittrick (2011:948) explains: In the Americas, free labour under bondage thus marked black working bodies as those "without"-without legible-Eurocentric history narratives, without land or home, without ownership of self-as this system forcibly secured black peoples to the geographic mechanics of the plantation economy.
The spaces that New World plantations occupied were discursively constructed as "lands of no one" (McKittrick 2013:7) through the racialising logics of colonialism and imperialism that rendered the inhabitants of such spaces lifeless and their geographic locales worthless. The plantation must be understood as spatially and temporally contingent (McKittrick 2013). This variation across time and space means that plantation pasts and futures, whilst connected through processes of dispossession (Beckford 2000), are never precisely the same. McKittrick's analysis of the plantation is indebted both to George Beckford's (1971)  dualities. Wynter (1971) emphasises that the plantation was simultaneously a dehumanising system of capitalist commodity production reliant on slave labour, but also the system through which Black people became rooted in the Americas. The structure of Caribbean societies is rooted in the relation between these "two poles which originate in a single historical process" (Wynter 1971:99) and the ambivalent relations between them. This relational duality characteristic of the Caribbean experience is the context for resistance to the racism and dehumanisation of the plantation. Cecilia Green's (2001) Marxist-feminist take on theories of the plantation is worth noting. Green, in conversation with earlier work such as Beckford's (2000), attends to this duality noting that plantation capitalism is reliant upon the social reproduction of the domestic economy which exists semiautonomous of hegemonic national capitalisms. Green (2001:65) deploys the concept of "mode of re/production" to capture the character of this duality and thus centres social reproductive work primarily performed by women as essential to the working of plantation societies but also as somewhat independent from plantation regimes. Returning to Wynter, alternative decolonial visions and praxes of resistance articulated by Black peoples in the Caribbean didn't develop externally to the plantation or emerge from an undisturbed pre-slavery folk culture (McKittrick 2013;Wynter 1971). Wynter, Green, and McKittrick recognise that a Black politics of freedom must be attuned to the active reworking of plantation narratives in response to historical contingency and development-an historical development that Black Caribbean peoples have actively shaped (Beckford 2000;Green 2001).
Whilst colonial and plantation power constructed the racialised spaces of the New World as the "lands of no one" (McKittrick 2013:7) the plantation was of course a site of encounter that produced Black modes of place-making (McKittrick 2011): ... a black sense of place can be understood as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter. (McKittrick 2011:949) Black place-making as a grounds for the exceeding of plantation spatialities recasts plantation space as a complex zone of racial entanglement that is both spatially and temporally extensive. This relational conception of the plantation is sensitive to the embodied experiences of both white and Black people that live(d) in plantation societies (McKittrick 2011;Wynter 1971). As Ouma and Premchander (2022) stress, academic writing on the plantation cannot be disembodied and disengaged. I therefore discuss my own positionality in the following section and my writing of histories of struggle against the plantation. McKittrick (2011) through a relational conception of the plantation opens the way to spatial connections beyond the immediate bounds of the place-making activities discussed. This provides a vector into Black internationalist spatialities. This relational understanding of Black place-making practices and the plantation allows decentres Eurocentric, colonial knowledge regimes that produce fixed racial categories and geographies (McKittrick 2011(McKittrick , 2013. As shown, Caribbean thinkers have long seen the relationality of the Caribbean experience, being in but not considered of the Modern world, as a generative basis to challenge injustice (Glissant 1997;Wynter 1971).
I now reflect on varied approaches to Black place-making and how these places might be connected. For Gowland (2021), Black place-making practices provide the conditions for enacting and imagining alternative spatial-political relations beyond the strictures of plantation racism and space-time (McKittrick 2013). This is important as Abeng and West Indian Black Power weren't just engaged in resistance to plantation spatialities and neo-colonialism, but sought to realise decolonial futures constructed through Black Power politics (ibid.). As Dunnavant (2021) reminds us, the efforts of Abeng and its various constituents should be understood within longer histories of marronage. Maroons asserted their agency spatially, fleeing the plantation and building maroon communities that flouted the enclosing, racialised logics and practices of the plantation and colonial state. Bledsoe and Wright (2019) highlight the pluralities that exist within efforts to enact Black liberation. In examining various US Black liberation movements they note shared antagonisms but highlight the divergent praxes and theories enacted in efforts to overcome these. Such work demonstrates the heterogeneity of Black diasporic political cultures (Edwards 2003) and suggests a need to study how these plural Black geographical projects were or might be connected through translocal relations. Heynen and Ybarra (2021) suggest land-based campaigns around environmental justice represent a point of connection for various Black, anti-racist, and Indigenous place-making projects to be cohered. They urge a focus on the terrains, territories, and antagonisms that can draw together diverse actors and communities united by shared experience of external control and degradation of place whilst remaining attuned to the situated nature of place-based struggles (ibid.).
I now draw on Black internationalist scholarship to understand how such placed spatial-political projects might be articulated. Beginning with the text that first coined the term "Black internationalism", West et al.'s (2009) From Toussaint to Tupac explores their central contention that in the latter half of the 18 th century there emerged a transnational Black consciousness and coeval internationalist movements that sought Black liberation across the Atlantic world. The authors' transnational framing emerges from earlier work on Atlantic history and particularly scholarship on the Black Atlantic (Edwards 2003;Gilroy 1993;Scott 2018). West et al. (2009:1) describe Black internationalism as: ... a product of consciousness, that is, the conscious interconnection and interlocution of black struggles across man-made and natural boundaries-including the boundaries of nations, empires, continents, oceans, and seas. From the outset, black internationalism envisioned a circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time.
This transnational consciousness and internationalist networks were responsive to local conditions and broader international or global changes in political-economy and geopolitics. What connected Black internationalist movements was the recognition that Black liberation in one locale could not be secured or defended whilst elsewhere Black communities lived under oppression. Black internationalists everywhere shared the common antagonism of racism and struggled to undo a The Abeng's Call similarly transnational racially delineated world order as articulated by W.E.B. DuBois in his conception of the "global colour line" (DuBois 2007). West et al. (2009) analyse the Haitian Revolution to illustrate their points and show that the Revolution's emancipatory ideals were not bounded to the French colony. With the Revolution beginning in 1791, slave revolts and maroon wars swept the Caribbean in the following decade united by the shared desire to smash racial slavery and undo the political-economy of plantation racial capitalism (ibid.). A Jamaican maroon war erupted in 1795. Beyond these shared goals, there were circuits of information and practice exchange constructed by Black peoples across the region. Julius Scott's (2018) path-breaking doctoral thesis originally produced in 1986 must be signalled. Scott charted the circulation of revolutionary and emancipatory politics around the late 18 th century Atlantic through maritime networks and carried by enslaved persons, escapees, and maroons to cosmopolitan port cities. Much later work on Black internationalism and the Black Atlantic is indebted to his study. As Linebaugh and Rediker (2001) describe, impressed and enslaved seamen brought news of revolution and spread practices of resistance across the Atlantic world. Dunnavant (2021) recounts the well-used maritime networks and mobilities of Caribbean maroons that allowed travel from island to island spreading praxes of resistance. These accounts position internationalism as a politics and practice enacted from below and exceeding the constraining spatialities of the plantation and the territoriality of empire (Featherstone 2015). Abeng consciously placed itself in this lineage through its naming. An "abeng" is a horn used by Jamaican Maroons to communicate over distance and in ways unintelligible to British colonialists. It is similarly associated with Maroon resistance to the colonial state as it could be used to organise militarily (Abeng 1969: Issue 1). By adopting this title, Abeng positioned itself as a call to action for Jamaica's sufferers and placed itself in a historical lineage of Jamaican anti-colonial resistance. Hodder et al. (2015) urge geographers to seriously engage with conceptualisations of internationalism in-line with other disciplines. They suggest a methodological nationalism perhaps constrains political geographic scholarship and this paper is an attempt to operate beyond this. Drawing on Black internationalist scholarship from other disciplines, I in common with a range of contemporary geographers (Featherstone 2013(Featherstone , 2015Hodder 2015Hodder , 2016Legg 2014) shed light on the multiple constructions of the international and the places through which these operated.
This broadening of the geographies of internationalism is generative in two key ways for this paper and scholarship on Black internationalism. Firstly, in expanding conceptions as to precisely who and where internationalist politics is enacted we can better foreground the plurality of personal and ideological trajectories and projects that constitute(d) Black internationalism (Hodder 2016). This accomplishes a similar project to Bledsoe and Wright (2019) in their charting of the pluralities of Black Geographies.
Secondly, geographical engagements with internationalism and Black internationalism crucially examine the localities and spatialities through which internationalist politics is articulated (Hodder 2015(Hodder , 2016Hodder et al. 2015). As Hodder (2016Hodder ( :1361 notes, studies of Black internationalism can all too easily: simply trace or describe the existence of cross-border connections in lieu of developing a more critical conceptual apparatus through which to differentiate them or challenge their basic assumptions. David Featherstone's (2013 extensive studies of Black internationalism in the context of subaltern anti-fascisms and maritime networks is useful here. Featherstone details the dynamic spatial imaginaries through which Black subaltern actors articulated their internationalist politics. For example, the ways African-American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War understood their struggle against Francoist fascism in relation to US Jim Crow and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Featherstone 2013). His studies of Black seafarers foregrounds the importance of trans-oceanic travel and circulations of politically-minded subaltern actors in enlivening Black internationalist networks and politics and similarly draws out the importance of the material geographies of print circulation (Featherstone 2015). I produce a similarly attuned account of Abeng but in drawing on Black Geographies scholarship I go further in asking how the places through which Black internationalist politics was enacted were actively constructed by Black Jamaican sufferers. To close, I discuss the internationalist dimensions of Caribbean political journalism as context for the upcoming empirical engagement with Abeng. Abeng sits in this lineage and the paper bore the hallmarks of these earlier efforts. As indicated by Putnam (2009), the Negro World is an important publication here. The paper was the official organ of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the global Pan-Africanist organisation that advocated transnational diasporic organisation alongside racial justice, equality, and dignity (Nettleford 1970). Garvey's writings were frequently drawn upon in Abeng. His efforts to build internationalist unity across the Black diaspora through the Negro World's global circulation, consumption, and reportage was praised extensively by Abeng alongside Garvey's anti-colonialism. Abeng was not alone in the late 1960s as an agitational and internationalist Black Caribbean publication. Publications such as Trinidad's Moko and Tapia, Antigua's Outlet, Guyana's Ratoon, and Jamaica's Bongo-Man (Lewis 2014) all articulated a radical Black politics that was internationalist in outlook. Events from across the Black and Third World received commentary and these publications circulated amongst the islands of the Caribbean and would reprint articles from one another.

Methods Statement
I have studied the entirety of Abeng's published issues held by the Digital Library of the Caribbean. 3 As geographical engagements with the archive show (Bressey 2016; Featherstone 2009) texts as material objects are productive factors in the establishment and maintenance of particular spatial and temporal relations. I have sought to retrace the journeys of Abeng as this reveals the practices and circuits through which Black place-making activities were effectively "joined up". I do this through collating primary accounts published in Abeng that covered reports by vendors on where and how they distributed the paper (Abeng 1969: Issue 20). Beyond the material connection of Abeng's circulation, I was attentive to how stories and reporters linked coverage of specific struggles or placed events in Jamaica to broader critiques of Jamaican political-economy and the racial stratification of Jamaican society, rhetorically connecting placed struggles into a broader critique of the continued manifestations of the plantation in postindependence Jamaica. I analysed the imagination and construction of Black internationalism in Abeng by assessing the terms on which sites of global Black and anti-imperialist struggle were related to the Jamaican experience. In articles written by all manner of ideologically and culturally positioned authors covering a broad range of issues what emerged was a consistent focus on the workings of racial-capitalism and (neo)imperialism and the states and agents that uphold these structures, with the conclusion drawn that it was international solidarity with those similarly opposing such forces that was required. Through reasoning, justification, and debate enabled through Abeng, the relevance of such sites and examples of Black and anti-imperialist political mobilisation to the lives of Jamaican suffers was stressed. The necessity for and basis of international solidarity was therefore clear (West et al. 2009).
As a white geographer working in a prominent British university-a university that directly benefited from West Indian slavery (Mullen and Newman 2018)-I recognise that I occupy a position of structural privilege (Desai 2017) that has allowed me to study West Indian Black Power and produce this paper. Writing about and researching this paper on Black radical politics and variously marginalised groups requires reflexivity and care (Ouma and Premchander 2022). This is necessary to avoid recapitulating historical scenes and narratives of anti-Black violence for academic currency (McKittrick 2013) and further to avoid reducing Black geographical thought and praxis to an object of study decontextualised from the places and projects it is grounded in. Over years of sustained engagement with West Indian Black Power and Left and Black Internationalist thought and action, my own politics has increasingly aligned with the groups, actors, and intellectuals I study. I am thankful that I have come to a Left politics through the work of West Indian theorists such as Walter Rodney, C.L.R. James, and George Padmore. The work of these figures and my growing knowledge of Caribbean labour struggle (Reddock 1994;Teelucksingh 2015) and Caribbean colonial and post-colonial history places foremost in my mind the interrelated nature of race, class, and capital and the need for any serious anti-capitalist politics to be similarly anti-racist and anti-imperialist (Roediger 2017). This paper foregrounds the voices and praxis of racialised peoples that sought the total overturning of the plantocracy and plantation logics that precluded mass equality in states structured by whitesupremacy and racial-capitalism (Hudson and McKittrick 2014). I signal Abeng and the Black place-making and Black Internationalist praxes enacted by sufferers involved with the Abeng movement as constituting an exemplary decolonial politics. Abeng as a corpus and the socio-political movement galvanised around it provides a significant source of Black geographical thought that necessitates further engagement to gain insight into historical and contemporary modes of spatial-political praxis that can confront and overturn plantation structures, spatialities and logics.

The Politics of Grounding in Abeng
In assessing Abeng's role in articulating variously placed Black struggles I turn to issue one that outlined the journal's vision. Two articles (Abeng 1969: Issue 1) entitled "Abeng Sounds a Call to Action" and "Bread, Work and Human Dignity"' position the paper as distinct from contemporaneous mainstream Jamaican press that is silent on issues affecting the mass of the population: The press has so far been dominated by wealth. First by the planters and secondly by businessmen for whom a newspaper is another commercial undertaking ... When we see what the press now defends in Jamaica we cannot help but recognise its patchedup colonial outlook. (Abeng 1969: Issue 1) The article "Abeng Sounds a Call to Action" places the paper in the lineage of Garvey and UNIA's publications that directly attacked colonial publications in their own time and articulated a politics of race solidarity and Pan-Africanism (Putnam 2009). In Issue 1, Abeng states a desire to aggregate and not lead with this informing a commitment to a mass-based and mass-directed politics of the Jamaican sufferer. Abeng would reflect the opinions of the broadest cross-section of Jamaican society possible, in contrast to existing newspapers dominated by the middle-class and "commercial interests" (ibid.). The means for achieving this was an extensive network of local editorial committees whose voices were represented in the collectively produced weekly paper. This commitment to operating as a forum for discussion and critique from below is outlined in early issues with editorial interventions stating the newspaper would "invite the views of everyone" (Abeng 1969: Issue 1) and that Abeng existed as a "medium for the people of this country to ground together" (Abeng 1969: Issue 2).
Grounding refers both to Rastafari religious practice and the Black Power politics of Guyanese historian and political agitator Walter Rodney who was active in Jamaica in 1968. Jamaica was one stop in Rodney's transnational intellectual and political life which would see him take up university posts in the Caribbean, USA and Tanzania (Rodney 1969) and he embodies the deep relationality between practices of Black place-making and Black internationalist activism I explore. In group discussions, as powerful moments where he developed his knowledge by actively listening to Jamaican sufferers. To ground represents a most intimate form of Black place-making with "a sitting down together to reason" (Rodney 1969:63) providing opportunity for Jamaican sufferers to articulate grievances with Jamaican coloniality and racial capitalism and simultaneously delineate visions exceeding these. Rodney visited Kingston's slums to ground with the people there and to discuss Black Power. As he describes: "You can learn from them what Black Power really means. You do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it and they add something" (ibid.). In such spaces of Black dispossession (Beckford 2000) there were enacted place-making practices that provided space for the discussion of Black Power and African history. This spatial-political praxis carved out places from which alternative decolonial visions could be articulated beyond the plantation spatialities that Jamaican sufferers lived within.
An editorial entitled "Abeng is Grounding" (Abeng 1969: Issue 12) positions the paper as a means to develop an anti-hierarchical spatial-politics with previously isolated sufferers and places drawn together ideologically and materially through the newspaper. The editorial describes how "Every week a force of volunteers moves the paper through the cities and into the countryside" (ibid.) with these efforts providing opportunities for politicisation and the collation of voices from across the island's sufferer communities. The piece continues: So that when the ABENG work force covers hundreds of miles and dozens of towns throughout Jamaica every Friday, the isolation of the people begins to wither away and all ground together as one. At each point, a shop, a yard or a street you will hear, how did the paper sell last week? ... Have you any news to report? ... What part are you playing locally in the defence of the oppressed?
The paper's distribution provided opportunities to ground with Jamaican sufferers coming together in their locales and transforming these spaces, however briefly, into places where news on the daily struggles against the manifestations of coloniality could be aired and collated. Former Abeng editor Robert Hill described how this politics of grounding was manifested through the vending and circulation: When the newspaper say, went to St Thomas, members of the editorial board went with the newspaper and held public meetings ... there was a political relationship that was being built. Circulation was a political act. To carry the newspaper, to identify with it, was the beginning of a political relationship. (Scott and Hill 1999:93) The material circulation of Abeng was central in constituting socio-political relations across space and in providing opportunities for people to ground together. Hill recounts how trade union struggle in a cold storage plant in Westmoreland developed through the work of the Abeng distributor in the area with a pamphlet on trade unionism emergent from this struggle later published in Abeng (ibid.). This is exemplary of how Abeng could amplify and articulate situated struggles in one part of Jamaica to other struggles across the island through the collation and publication of such stories.
Abeng and the group surrounding it also sought to popularise "Abeng assemblies" (Abeng 1969: Issue 6). These assemblies are first discussed in Issue 6: Abeng assemblies are being organised as from next week on a monthly basis. On every such occasion, we will start to reason together ... the assemblies will provide the means for communication, for organization, for working for ourselves. Understanding and confidence will come. Then Jamaicans will be able to take charge of our country and its resources and our lives.
The Abeng assemblies brought together and amplified the voice of the island's sufferer population and provided a means for consciousness raising amongst Jamaica's sufferers. The assemblies worked to counter the editorial control of the paper by privileged figures within Jamaican society. This was seen in the places in which these assemblies were held. Assemblies were hosted outwith the UWI campus in Kingston with recorded assemblies occurring in Kingston's "downtown" and a large number held in Jamaica's rural parishes and provincial towns: Santa Cruz, Falmouth, Brown's Town, Spanish Town, May Pen, and Port Antonio (Abeng 1969: Issues 2 and 15). This reflected the efforts made to circulate the paper widely across the island with particular efforts in Jamaica's more rural and poorer parishes (Scott and Hill 1999).
Read alongside groundings, these assemblies represented a similar placemaking practice drawing together grievances with the coloniality of life in Jamaica and providing a space where politics of resistance and overcoming could be envisioned and enacted. The assemblies as groundings "will provide the means for communication, for organization, for working for ourselves" with these spaces of sufferer political mobilisation drawn together into a national movement through affiliation with and material possession of the newspaper (Abeng 1969: Issue 6). This politics would culminate with the desired decolonial future articulated through Black Power politics: "Jamaicans ... [being] able to take charge of our country and its resources and our lives" (ibid.). As the following section shows, from these assemblies were elaborated Black internationalist imaginaries and solidarities that linked said places to broader internationalist networks.

Assemblies in Action: Anguilla
Issue 8 of Abeng provides insight into how Abeng assemblies operated. The issue covered an assembly held in response to the British invasion of Anguilla and the Black internationalist imaginaries the event was woven into. The invasion came after the Anguillans had first voted to secede from the colonial territory of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla in 1967 and following failed negotiations with British authorities a referendum was held in early 1969 resulting in a unilateral declaration of independence (Abeng 1969: Issue 8).
Reporting on the assembly states "Another remarkable Abeng assembly of black people and their supporters took place on Wednesday March 19. Over 400 angry citizens of all classes ... [attended]" (Abeng 1969: Issue 8). The relatively high attendance speaks to the powerful sense of injustice felt by Black West Indians following the Anguilla invasion and commitment to solidarity with those facing imperialist aggression. This solidarity with Anguilla is reflective of Abeng's and West Indian Black Power's core goals of internationalist Black solidarity. We are told: The Abeng's Call Unity and organisation now was desirable and possible. Unity between all blacks and others who wished to overthrow white oppression; organisation to meet the attacks which must come against the creation of a fully human society. (Abeng 1969: Issue 8) This organisation took the form of unanimous demands for Jamaican unions to shut down British businesses for 24 hours and the British High Commissioner to be expelled from Jamaica within 48 hours if British troops didn't leave Anguilla (ibid.). This example demonstrates how Abeng operated as a means for sociopolitical rallying and action. Through the political community and networks established by the paper's material circulation and the Black internationalist imaginaries outlined above a gathering of some 400 Black Power aligned individuals was made possible after two months of publication. This local self-organisation and assertion of political agency is reminiscent of the similar community-based politics of the US Black Panther Party (Heynen 2009;Tyner 2006) with Bledsoe and Wright (2019) noting such efforts as an example of Black place-making in practice. This assembly and others like it represent the places wherein Black internationalist imaginaries were articulated. Here, we see the production of a place for the gathering of radically-minded sufferers and other Jamaicans who articulate a politics of transnational Black solidarity in opposition to imperialist military power.
The dynamics of the assemblies are discussed in Abeng Issue 10. Reporting on an assembly held on 26 March 1969 on Camp Road, Kingston discusses the meeting's attendees: "Rastafarians, youth, some of whom would face 'Judge Dread' in court the next day, had come" (Abeng 1969: Issue 10). These youth ejected a plain-clothes police officer when they recognised him-from previous run-ins and harassment, presumably. The assembly discussed the newspaper's distribution with attendees recounting their experiences of vending. Again, the importance of the newspaper's circulation and coeval politicisation of a readership of sufferers is underscored. The format of the assembly was an open group discussion with various speakers given the floor to raise and debate topics related to the paper. Both in logistical or strategic terms and in the sense of discussing the "issues of the day" exemplified through Anguilla.
Abeng broadened the Black internationalist imaginaries that events in Anguilla were understood through. Abeng situated the Anguillan invasion within a long history of imperialist oppression in the Caribbean: together to build space for the expression of an anti-colonial politics. Simultaneously, the assembly is precisely the place where internationalist imaginaries and solidarities were articulated drawing on deeper histories and knowledges of the politics of the global colour line (DuBois 2007).

The Black Internationalist Struggle Continues: Montreal
The Anguilla assembly linked events there to the Sir George Williams University affair in Montreal. The affair centred on a predominantly Black-led student occupation of the university's computer centre organised in response to staff racism and the subsequent heavy-handed police raid which resulted in 96 students standing trial (Abeng 1969: Issue 4;Austin 2013). The affair had a significant impact on West Indian politics and the burgeoning Black Power movement. West Indian students lodged the original complaint of staff racism and numerous West Indian students were involved in the protests and subsequent arrests and criminal trials (ibid). Abeng covered the developing situation in Montreal, linking the students' experiences of anti-Black racism in Canada to transnational relations of capitalist-imperialist exploitation between the Caribbean and North American Metropole (Austin 2013;Rodney 1969). Abeng helped in establishing an international support network for the Montreal students and popularising their struggle.
The Abeng assembly that discussed Anguilla directly linked events there to Montreal: [The assembly] ... agreed that British intervention in Anguilla and Canadian brutilization of West Indian students confirmed the experience of a slave society ... The force used against the students and the Anguillans was present throughout the history of the black struggle for freedom. (Abeng 1969: Issue 8) The assembly-goers recognised that these events confirmed the existence of a transnational slave society that required a similarly transnational response in the form of Black unity and organisation. The assembly called for the expulsion of the British and Canadian High Commissioners from Jamaica if the troops were not recalled and the trials dropped (ibid.). Here we see the broadening of the Black internationalist imaginaries constructed in the previous section to include West Indian students in Montreal and the manifestations of plantation racism they faced. The situated examples of Anguilla and Montreal were understood by assembly-goers through relation to global geographies of white, imperialist exploitation and long histories of Caribbean (neo)colonial oppression (Palmer 2010).
In Issue 4, an article covers the travels of two West Indian students from Montreal, Terrance Ballantyne and Patrick Townsend, pictured on a Caribbean fundraising trip for the students' legal defence. The article recounts events in Montreal and demonstrates the centrality of claims to place in the articulation of a Black politics of freedom. The students occupied the university's computer centre after the administration failed to listen to their requests for the formation of a committee to investigate the racism charges (Abeng 1969: Issue 4). After 12 days of occupation the administration agreed to accede to their requests but reneged on The Abeng's Call this promise the next day as students began to vacate the building. Once students re-occupied the building the police were called in (ibid.). What followed were disgusting scenes of police brutality and racial and sexual harassment. An article in Issue 6 reports that students were beaten and threatened with firearms with some hospitalised; police officers spat in students' faces whilst using racial epithets; and female students were subject to sexist insults and harassment by white officers (Abeng 1969: Issue 6). Students were subsequently charged with crimes relating to property damage and conspiracy to commit arson. The primary tactic utilised by the Montreal students was the reclamation of place within the university that had failed to intervene in their racist harassment and in defiance of the white authorities that held them in racial contempt. I would position this as an insurgent act of Black place-making.
The article covering the travels of the Montreal students ended with a call for contributions to their defence fund with the requisite details provided (Abeng 1969: Issue 4). Here was formed transnational solidarities across the Black world in opposition to the common antagonisms of racial violence and harassment that "identify the spatial work of race and racism" in the plantation (McKittrick 2013:9). Such solidarities were materially manifest through the donation of funds with Abeng in its physical circulation in Jamaica and in its construction of internationalist solidarities with the Montreal students providing the means for this.
Abeng's discussion of events in Montreal further articulated a critical raceconscious analysis of the transnational relations between the West Indies and Canada. The article "Canada's White Lies" (Abeng 1969: Issue 7) deploys a neocolonial analysis of the relations between Jamaica and Canada with the context being the Jamaican government and mainstream press' fawning over the Canadian Governor General on a 1969 visit. This was part of a wider tour of the Commonwealth Caribbean and in Trinidad the Governor General was blocked from entering the UWI St Augustine campus by students protesting events in Montreal (Pantin 1990). This was portentous, as from this activity emerged the group that would in many senses lead Trinidad's Black Power Revolution a year later in 1970. Abeng identified the "house-slave press" (Abeng 1969: Issue 7) in Jamaica that called for an official government apology for events in Montreal and the payment of compensation for property damage. Such rhetoric recognised the renewal of plantation relations and subjectivities in the post-colonial present and mobilised a Fanonian critique of a "white-hearted" nationalist bourgeoisie. This neo-colonial analysis was further developed with Jamaica's "good relations" with Canada seen to facilitate capitalist-imperialist exploitation of Jamaican resources, notably bauxite, with the expatriation of profits to Canada far outweighing aid payments to Jamaica (Abeng 1969: Issue 7). Lastly, the racial stratification of Jamaican and Canadian society is assessed: "Canadians living here come in at the top of our society. Those of us who go there go in at the bottom of theirs" (ibid.). Abeng critically notes the primacy of race in the social and class structure of both nations with the uniting factor of the devaluation of blackness revealing a Black internationalist spatial imaginary of a type with Rodney's (1969) global white power system or DuBois' (2007) global colour line. In Abeng's analysis, situated episodes of racial oppression are positioned within broader contexts of neo-colonial international and economic relations. Thus situating contemporaneous events within broader histories and geographies of coloniality and white supremacy.

Conclusion
I have shown how Abeng supported Black place-making efforts and positioned such efforts within Black internationalist spatial imaginaries that facilitated the building of international solidarities. I thus add to Black Geographies scholarship in assessing how places of Black liberation are connected through translocal relations. These relations drawing together and moving between the plural tendencies that constitute Black geographical projects (Bledsoe and Wright 2019). Abeng became a material and discursive means through which a politics of grounding (Rodney 1969) could be enacted with Jamaican sufferers engaging in placemaking activities exceeding the strictures of plantation spatialities (Kamugisha 2007(Kamugisha , 2019Thame 2011Thame , 2017. Abeng assemblies enabled construction of spaces for the expression of sufferer's grievances and the cohering of common political struggles with this exemplified in relation to events in Anguilla (Abeng 1969: Issue 8). It was the convening of these assemblies that enabled the articulation of transnational solidarities with the Anguillans and students in Montreal. I therefore contribute to scholarship on the construction of the international by demonstrating the material and imagined practices and places through which Black internationalist imaginaries and political solidarities were forged . In this case through the circulation, reading and agitation of the radical political newspaper.
Returning to the questions posed in the introduction, I first asked how and where the international is imagined and constructed (Hodder 2016;Hodder et al. 2015). Abeng enabled the development of a Black internationalist politics through its discursive function detailing and collating the daily struggles of Jamaican sufferers seeking to overcome the structures and logics of racism they faced. Such "local" stories were constantly connected in the rhetoric of the paper's reporting to the global oppression of non-white people by racial-capitalist, imperialist and (neo)colonial power. In a material sense, Abeng's distribution and the organising of assemblies through the paper allowed for moments of grounding and Black place-making activities in which a Black internationalist politics was elaborated. Assemblies allowed for the organisation of solidarity efforts internationally and were places where Abeng's internationalist politics could be debated and reasoned.
Turning to the second question, how can Black place-making efforts be understood in relation across time and space? The moments when an assembly was held or groundings occurred alongside the paper's distribution and reading could be understood as singular, bounded examples of resistances to the plantation (McKittrick 2011(McKittrick , 2013. However, such places were connected through the imagined community and material circulation of the newspaper. These Black place-making examples would not have happened without the politics developed by and connections afforded through Abeng. Abeng's politics of Black internationalism provided an imaginary through which place-making efforts were understood as connected to global sites of struggle to overcome plantation spatialities.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Geographical Club Award, administered by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). I would like to thank the three viewers for the incredibly insightful and valuable comments that have strengthened this paper immensely. Thanks also to Antipode Editor Prof. Stefan Ouma for his challenging and constructive comments that have shaped not only this paper but also my work moving forwards.

Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Digital Library of the Caribbean at https://dloc.com/ Endnotes 1 The Jamaican dub-poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's 1976 article "Jamaican rebel music" is instructive here. In assessing Jamaican popular music as expressive of the historical and contemporaneous suffering, pain, and violence faced by Jamaican sufferers he also sees in that same cultural production a strength and will to resist that characterises the suffer as a political subjectivity. For Johnson, the "rebel" music of the Jamaican 1970s was the selfauthored expression of the sufferer and was the latest instantiation of deeper histories of Black creative expression in Jamaica. The Jamaican sufferer as an historical and political subject lives "a rebel existence" (Johnson 1976:399), living in spite of and determined to overcome the many hardships they face. 2 I adopt the framework of the international and Black internationalism instead of the Black diaspora. Like West et al. (2009) I am concerned with Black struggles that are consciously connected to an overarching notion of Black liberation extending across territorial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. "The international" therefore signals a specifically political form of translocal relation which reference to the diaspora doesn't necessarily convey. Further, central to Black internationalism is a desire for universal emancipation and a radical humanism that sees Black internationalist solidarities extend beyond racial boundaries to include all manner of oppressed groups (Kamugisha 2019;West et al. 2009). Reference to the Black diaspora alone would elide this important dimension of the Black Power politics I study. 3 Available at https://www.dloc.com/title-sets/UF00100338 (last accessed 12 August 2022).