African Americans have a long history of active involvement and interest in international affairs, but their efforts have been largely ignored by scholars of American foreign policy. Gayle Plummer brings a new perspective to the study of twentieth-century American history with her analysis of black Americans' engagement with international issues, from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 through the wave of African independence movements of the early 1960s. Plummer first examines how collective definitions of ethnic identity, race, and racism have influenced African American views on foreign affairs. She then probes specific developments in the international arena that galvanized the black community, including the rise of fascism, World War II, the emergence of human rights as a factor in international law, the Cold War, and the American civil rights movement, which had important foreign policy implications. However, she demonstrates that not all African Americans held the same views on particular issues and that a variety of considerations helped shape foreign affairs agendas within the black community just as in American society at large.
Racism and imperialism are the twin forces that propelled the course of the United States in the world in the early twentieth century and in turn affected the way that diplomatic history and international relations were taught and understood in the American academy. Evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, and racial anthropology had been dominant doctrines in international relations from its beginnings; racist attitudes informed research priorities and were embedded in newly formed professional organizations. In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.Within the rigidly segregated profession, the "Howard School of International Relations" represented the most important center of opposition to racism and the focal point for theorizing feasible alternatives to dependency and domination for Africans and African Americans through the early 1960s. Vitalis pairs the contributions of white and black scholars to reconstitute forgotten historical dialogues and show the critical role played by race in the formation of international relations.
An introduction to the complex relationship between African Americans and the African continent What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? Rising immigration levels, globalization, and the United States’ first African American president have all sparked new dialogue around the question. This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
Race matters in both national and international politics. Starting from this perspective, African American Perspectives on Political Science presents original essays from leading African American political scientists. Collectively, they evaluate the discipline, its subfields, the quality of race-related research, and omissions in the literature. They argue that because Americans do not fully understand the many-faceted issues of race in politics in their own country, they find it difficult to comprehend ethnic and racial disputes in other countries as well. In addition, partly because there are so few African Americans in the field, political science faces a danger of unconscious insularity in methodology and outlook. Contributors argue that the discipline needs multiple perspectives to prevent it from developing blind spots. Taken as a whole, these essays argue with great urgency that African American political scientists have a unique opportunity and a special responsibility to rethink the canon, the norms, and the directions of the discipline.
In nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia, a West African colony established by the United States government and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In The Price of Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825 and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world. For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region. But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured" Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.
Chicago has belonged to the world for a century, but its midcontinental geography once demanded a leap of the intellect and imagination to grasp this reality. During that century, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs guided and defined the way Chicago thinks about its place in the world. Founded in 1922 as the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, as a forum to engage Chicagoans in conversations about world affairs, both its name and mission have changed. Today it is an educational vehicle that brings the world to Chicago, and a think tank that works to influence that world. At its centenary, it is the biggest and most influential world affairs council west of New York and Washington, with a local impact and global reach. Chicago and the World is a dual history of the first one hundred years of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and of the foreign policy battles and debates that crossed its stage. The richness of these debates lay in their immediacy. All were reports from the moment, analyses of current crises, and were delivered by men and women who had no idea how the story would end. Some were comically wrong, others eerily prescient, and some so wise that we still profit from their lessons today. The history of the past century reflects the history of the Council from its birth as a worldly outpost in a provincial hotbed of isolationism to its status today as a major institution in one of the world’s leading global cities. It is a tumultuous history, full of ups and downs, driven by vivid characters, and enlivened by constant debate over where the institution and its city belong in the world. The Council of today has a bias very similar to that of the Council of 1922— that openness is the only rational response to global complexity. It rejected the isolationism of 1922 and it rejects nationalism now. In 1922, it recognized that the outside world affected Chicago every day. In 2022, it insists that Chicago affects that world. Chicago then was a receptor for outside ideas. Chicago today is a generator of ideas and events. Both the world and Chicago have changed, but the Council’s goals—openness, clarity, involvement—remain the same. History of the Council: The Chicago Council on Global Affairs was founded in 1922 amid the aftermath of World War I, the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations, and the influenza pandemic of 1918. Today, at its centenary, it is the biggest world affairs council west of New York and Washington, DC. It is both a forum for debate on global issues and a think tank working to influence those issues. Chicago and the World offers a dual history of the Council and the great foreign policy issues of the past century. Founded in America’s heartland, the Council now guides the international thinking of one of the world’s great global cities. Its speakers include the men and women who shaped the century: Georges Clemenceau, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jan Masaryk, George Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Joseph Biden, and Barack Obama, among others. There have been Nobel Prize winners and Nazis, one-worlders and America-Firsters. The Council emerged in a Chicago dominated by isolationism. It led the great debate over American participation in World War II and, after that war, over our nation’s new dominant role in the world. As a forum, it struggled with major issues: Vietnam, the Cold War, 9/11. As a think tank, it helps lead our nation’s thinking on global cities, global food security, the global economy, and foreign policy. The Council’s one hundredth anniversary follows another pandemic, the Covid-19 crisis, at a time when a new wave of nationalism and nativism distorts America’s place in the world. The Council sees itself as nonpartisan but not neutral in this debate. It is committed to the ideal of an informed citizenry at home and openness and involvement abroad.
During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.
