After the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, the Native Republic Thesis, or Black-Belt Thesis, became a noted platform for the Communist Parties of South Africa and the United States. The platform called for self-determination for Black Africans and Black Americans respectively. Historians have often reframed this platform as a call for selfdetermination on racial lines, and the thesis has become a prominent part of histories of these communist parties. Taking a comparative and transnational approach, this article argues that the Native Republic Thesis and its key tenets (including calls for a workers' and peasants' republic or for a nation within a nation) may have extended beyond the issue of racial selfdetermination. These tenets can be found, with some variation, in similar contemporaneous communist platforms in Latin America, Australia, Belgium and the Balkans. In the process of developing this argument, this article highlights the benefits of taking a fresh look at Comintern platforms from a transnational and comparative perspective; here this approach has suggested new questions about communist or Soviet perspectives on self-determination and nationhood, and about Comintern leadership.

More from our Archive

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15133402 2023

  Hyperspectral Image Classification Based on Fusing S3-PCA, 2D-SSA and Random Patch Network

  Huayue Chen, Tingting Wang, Tao Chen, Wu Deng

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15143534 2023

  Measurement of Total Dissolved Solids and Total Suspended Solids in Water Systems: A Review of the Issues, Conventional, and Remote Sensing Techniques

  Godson Ebenezer Adjovu, Haroon Stephen, David James, Sajjad Ahmad

• DOI: 10.1029/2022gl102493 2023

  Projected Changes in Hot, Dry, and Compound Hot‐Dry Extremes Over Global Land Regions

  Paolo De Luca, Markus G. Donat

• DOI: 10.3390/geosciences13070197 2023

  Internal Friction Angle of Cohesionless Binary Mixture Sand–Granular Rubber Using Experimental Study and Machine Learning

  Firas Daghistani, Abolfazl Baghbani, Hossam Abuel Naga, Roohollah Shirani Faradonbeh

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15133327 2023

  Coseismic Faulting Model and Post-Seismic Surface Motion of the 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquake Doublet Revealed by InSAR and GPS Measurements

  Jing-Jing Zhao, Qiang Chen, Ying-Hui Yang, Qian Xu

• DOI: 10.1093/oxfimm/iqad006 2023

  The current state and future of T-cell exhaustion research

  Edward Jenkins, Toby Whitehead, Martin Fellermeyer, Simon J Davis, Sumana Sharma

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15133364 2023

  Unveiling Air Pollution in Crimean Mountain Rivers: Analysis of Sentinel-5 Satellite Images Using Google Earth Engine (GEE)

  Vladimir Tabunschik, Roman Gorbunov, Tatiana Gorbunova

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15133314 2023

  A Benchmark for Multi-Modal LiDAR SLAM with Ground Truth in GNSS-Denied Environments

  Ha Sier, Qingqing Li, Xianjia Yu, Jorge Peña Queralta, Zhuo Zou, Tomi Westerlund

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15143569 2023

  UAV-Based Terrain Modeling in Low-Vegetation Areas: A Framework Based on Multiscale Elevation Variation Coefficients

  Jiaxin Fan, Wen Dai, Bo Wang, Jingliang Li, Jiahui Yao, Kai Chen

• DOI: 10.3390/rs15143556 2023

  Investigation of the Vertical Distribution Characteristics and Microphysical Properties of Summer Mineral Dust Masses over the Taklimakan Desert Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

  Xiaowen Zhou, Tian Zhou, Shuya Fang, Bisen Han, Qing He