This ouverture, or opening of the theoretical and critical stakes of my study, rehearses questions of comparison, immediacy in the archive, and the complications of collaboration in a series of juxtapositions that include C.L.R. James’s review of two works by Raymond Williams, the composition of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Edouard Glissant on the conditions of Caribbean theater, Fanon versus Paul Robeson on the Vietnamese Revolution, and the applicability of Brechtian thought to studies of Black radicalism as well as the question of use in Brechtian poetics.