Race Against Empire

Marshaling evidence from a wide array of international sources, including the black presses of the time, Penny M. Von Eschen offers a vivid portrayal of the African diaspora in its international heyday, from the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress to early cooperation with the United Nations. Tracing the relationship between transformations in anti-colonial politics and the history of the United States during its emergence as the dominant world power, she challenges bipolar Cold War paradigms. She documents the efforts of African-American political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists who forcefully promoted anti-colonial politics and critiqued U.S. foreign policy.

The eclipse of anti-colonial politics--which Von Eschen traces through African-American responses to the early Cold War, U.S. government prosecution of black American anti-colonial activists, and State Department initiatives in Africa--marked a change in the very meaning of race and racism in America from historical and international issues to psychological and domestic ones. She concludes that the collision of anti-colonialism with Cold War liberalism illuminates conflicts central to the reshaping of America; the definition of political, economic, and civil rights; and the question of who, in America and across the globe, is to have access to these rights.

--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class "Race and Class"

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Von Eschen, Penny M.
Published: 04/03/1997
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801482922
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 8.95h x 5.99w x 0.66d