Black Internationalism--the Class

James Baldwin in Turkey. Photo found at Northwest African American Museum

I am teaching a "Topics in US History" course next semester and I need to get my course description approved this week. I'm planning to teach the course on "Black Internationalism: African American Engagement with the World." I'm going to use James Campbell's compelling book Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa,1787-2005 as the anchor to the course.  It has the advantage of moving forward 20-40 years in each chapter and also draws readers in by discussing big ideas through the lens of a single or at times a handful of individuals. I am going to pair the different chapters with relevant primary sources, such as Martin Delaney's Blake, Alexander Crummel's essays, Du Bois editorials from The Crisis, global Hip Hop songs, etc. (Lisa Lindsay has a lovely syllabus that uses Middle Passages in an honors course about US relations to Africa). There are 9 chapters, so for the other 6 weeks of the course, I'm going to concentrate on other parts of the world. So far the course is Europe and Africa heavy, so I need to think about bringing in Asia and Latin America. I had thought about assigning Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism, but perhaps I will do something from Nico Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism instead. Perhaps I will pair the Langston Hughes' chapter in Middle Passages with his autobiography The Big Sea. That will bring in Europe in the 1920s, so then I could use the week I had devoted to that topic to bring in African Americans in Haiti.



I could start thinking about daily topics instead of weekly topics, which would give me more room in the schedule. The problem is that I don't know whether the class will be a MWF or a TH and I find that fairly dramatically changes the way I schedule.

I often like to include something from NPR, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or other intelligent but not scholarly sources to show students that there are myriad ways to stay connected to ideas past their graduation. For this course, I'm thinking of assigning the New Yorker's "'Another Country' James Baldwin's flight from America" by Claudia Roth Pierpont.

Here's my course description. Any suggestions?

How does travel change a person’s understanding of themselves? What happens when a person facing discrimination at home feels greater freedom abroad, like most of the African Americans who traveled abroad in the 19^th and 20^thcenturies? This course will explore different ideas of internationalism, both political and personal, among African Americans. Travels abroad, physically and textually, have been essential to the process of building an African American identity. African Americans approached their journeys with many different philosophies, including Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, Christianity, pacifism, and militancy. They developed ideas of missionizing Africa as well as joining with Africans to challenge white supremacy. They criticized inequality in Asia, rejoiced in the Japanese triumph over Russia in 1905, and eventually built a spirit of common cause with other colonized peoples. Ideas about internationalism transformed over the two hundred and fifty years since the United States and Haitian revolutions; this course will interrogate those changes and their influence on global politics and personal identities.

Mabel Byrd's race-conscious internationalism

These are the first two paragraphs of the chapter I'm currently polishing.
In the summer of 1927, black Oregonian and Harlem transplant Mabel Byrd prepared to leave the country of her birth for the first time. The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) industrial secretary had won a Quaker scholarship to study settlement houses in England. To wish her well, Harlem society rallied around the 31 year old for a proper goodbye party. Roberta Bosley, librarian at the New York Public Library branch on 135^th street (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), hosted a musical tea in Byrd’s honor on Easter Sunday afternoon. The Chicago Defender reported that “two hundred prominent social, literary, and musical persons enjoyed the program.”[1] Listening to the music and nibbling on tea sandwiches were Harlem Renaissance personalities, and veterans of European travel, including poet Countee Cullen, painter Aaron Douglass, and Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset. Also in attendance were Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Johnson, editor of the Urban League’s Opportunity. In between piano, soprano, and tenor solos, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps read poetry. Many of her Delta sorority sisters eagerly shared with Byrd their own stories of international travel. Soror Yolande Du Bois and her parents, W. E. B. and Nina, would miss their feisty and intelligent friend, but promised to write.

During her journey abroad, Mabel Byrd increasingly inhabited a race-conscious internationalism, which united respect of black accomplishments with attraction to communist ideology about workers’ rights. She was able to unite what white leftists thought immutably separate—race consciousness and socialism.[2] Her travels led her to protest against pacifism and interracialism, articulating an understanding of activism much more common during the Civil Rights Era than her own.  When Byrd arrived in England to study the settlement house movement, she wrote to Du Bois asking for materials on the Fourth Pan-African Congress to distribute to her new acquaintances. She was sad to miss the Congress, but excited to be taking in the complicated reality of Europe. By the end of the summer, she had found a position at the International Labor Organization (ILO), connected to the League of Nations. Her job was to research the status of African workers in the Mandate regions. Countee Cullen and Juliette Derricotte visited her in Geneva and she stayed with the Robesons and Alain Locke in London. She distributed New Negro Renaissance literature to the young people of other races working at the League of Nations, sharing ideal visions of a harmonious world with them. In her letters to New Negro leaders, Byrd articulated a passionate political perspective rather than concentrating on the tourism part of her journey. While Derricotte returned from her trips abroad advocating a “spirit of cooperation,” Byrd argued that the only way forward was by directly confronting white supremacy, whether it was embodied in imperialist government or patient, sweet-seeming Christian ladies.[3] Throughout her journey, Byrd challenged black male radicals who “replicated contemporary gender notions of women as wives and mothers of the race who should be concerned with maintaining their physical beauty and raising future revolutionaries,” as Minkah Makalani explains.[4] The challenge was implicit in her actions rather than communicated in her few extant letters and speeches.

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[1] In 1933, Byrd reported her age as 34, but the census names her as 14 years old in 1910. “1910 Census” (Canonsburg Borough, Washington County, Pennsylvania, April 29, 1910), www.ancestry.org; “Mabel Byrd Registration Blank, Second Amenia Conference”, 1933, Box 95-13 Folder 523, Spingarn Papers MSRC.

[2] Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 88–89.

[3] Juliette Derricotte to YM and YWCA Presidents, November 20, 1924, Box 90-2 Folder 45, Slowe Papers MSRC.

[4] Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 48.

Reconsidering my reconsideration of "the racial protocol"

You might remember my prior meditations on the "racial protocol" here and more recently here. Today I'm writing a stream-of-consciousness meditation on both the "racial protocol" and black internationalism.

My inspiration for reconsidering the "racial protocol" came from Anastasia Curwood's book Stormy Weather:

The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term 'racial protocol' for the assumption that African Americans' experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance. As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-dimensional representation of African Americans' lives.

I was discussing this idea over dinner with a friend and colleague. He suggested that I border, if not tip over into, the offensive by attacking the "racial protocol," because it sounds like I am neglecting (if not negating) the oppression, in which, as a white person, I am implicated.

I removed the above quote from my talk and instead focused on this quote from Claudia Tate herself (in her book l, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, 1998):

The black text mediates two broad categories of experience: one is historically racialized and regulated by African American cultural performance; the other is the individual and subjective experience of personal desire signified in language.

This makes my analysis both/and rather than either/or. Both oppression/struggle and three dimensional subjective individuals are important. Both race and other identities are involved in the identity formation of my research subjects. I believe that this both/and emphasis is more reflective of what I do in my work, in which race/oppression/struggle matters as one primary category of analysis, but in which they are not the only categories.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this is in contradistinction to Michael West's and William Martin's argument that the black international “has a single defining characteristic: struggle." This struggle is born of consciousness and the dream of a “circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time” (From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution, 2009). 

By analyzing the three-dimension subjectivity of individuals, I can understand how Eslanda Robeson's and Emma Goldman's relationship was primarily social, but through the click of their personalities, the aging Goldman persuaded the young Robeson toward a more radical stance on economic issues. West and Martin's formulation makes it seem predetermined that a black person would choose struggle, when in fact that choice was born of dark nights of the soul and wrenching decisions to put oneself and one's loved ones at risk.

At the same time, I've been pondering what makes black internationalism distinct when compared to Pan-Asian or Wilsonian inspired anti-colonial movements (I'm relying upon Erez Manela's Wilsonian Moment there). West and Martin offer a very succinct explanation of difference.

Reading some Social Darwinists for my USIH class, though, makes struggle as a defining characteristic unattractive. William Graham Sumner argues that "life on earth must be maintained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with other forms of life." (American Intellectual Tradition, p28).

Perhaps, then, it is not the fact of struggle that is defining so much as what is being struggled towards--the dream of "a circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time." The meaning of that emancipation for a Christian missionary returning to Africa to civilize it, or Marcus Garvey's desire to also return to Africa to impose his own kind of civilization, is not so uni-dimensional or clear-cut.

One of the essays in West and Martin's collection offers a more nuanced alternative. Lara Putnam, in "Nothing Matters but Color: Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International" argues

First, that migration and migrants' activities created a West Indian-centered black internationalist world in the first decades of the twentieth century; second, that this world came under attack as a result of the rise of narrow, racially defined nationalism and imperial closures in the interwar years; and third, that the attacks reinforced 'race consciousness' among migrants, spurring increasingly explicit black internationalist critiques of imperial and neocolonial power.

She follows this with the conclusion that "In the interwar years, West Indian community leaders of diverse class positions and ideologies came to a common conclusion: only by putting race first could people of African descent attain collective uplift in a modern, racist world." [I wonder about the contrast between this quote and her title, in which she foregrounds color. It does not seem to me that color and race were the same thing in the Caribbean; indeed intraracial discrimination often occurred along color lines]

I'm so compelled by that statement, because some of the people that I study reached the opposite conclusion. Juliette Derricotte decided that fellowship could only be achieved, not by ignoring race, but by concentrating on similar religious convictions (she was among a diverse body of Christians, all trying to find a way to overcome racial and national animosities in 1928). Ralph Bunche, on the other hand, decided that the only way to overcome racism was by finding and attacking its economic root.

One of the things that most intrigues me about West and Martin's edited collection is the way that internationalism actually solidifies nationalism (is this the same as the thesis that Italian nationalism was created in America by Italian migrants? It is by being in a place where you are different that you search for someone who is similar). I think Erez Manela makes a similar argument in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Manela argues that the emergence of the circumstances for decolonization was due "to the establishment, for the first time, of international institutions and norms that allowed, indeed invited anticolonial nationalists to challenge colonial powers in an external arena, circumventing and thereby weakening the imperial relationship." Manela is looking particularly at internationalist organizations like the League of Nations, while Putnam is considering more the experiences of individual British West Indian migrants, but both express the vibrancy of the international dialogue during the interwar era.

Putnam writes, "The black internationalism articulated by British West Indian migrants in the interwar years was not a revival of tradition, but a particular vision of the future, developed in dialogue and in step with the other nationalisms that defined North Atlantic modernity."

She and Manela certainly aid my argument that the interwar era represents a distinct moment in black American and black international history, rather than the culmination of the nadir or the beginnings of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Another interesting consideration around the question of the black international is when does someone become a nationalist, when does someone become a Pan-Africanist (with or without becoming a nationalist) and when does someone become what Nico Slate terms a "colored cosmopolitan" (someone who felt common cause with other people of color in an anticolonial struggle)? I think that question of motivations and decisions will become a central one for my book.