Book contents
- Race, Rights and Reform
- Global and International History
- Race, Rights and Reform
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Terminology and Language
- Introduction
- 1 Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment
- 2 Anti-imperial Comrades: Black Radicalism and the Communist Possibility
- 3 La vogue nègre: Racial Renaissance at the Intersection of Republic, Empire and Democracy
- 4 Civilization’s Gone to Hell? Revolutionary Poetry, Humanism and the Crisis of Sovereignty
- 5 Give Me Liberty! Black Intellectual Struggles against Fascism in the Fight for Democracy
- 6 “A New Fascism, the American Brand”: Anti-communism, Anti-imperialism and the Struggle for the West
- 7 “The Sword of Damocles”: Présence Africaine and Decolonization in the Face of the Cold War
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2021
- Race, Rights and Reform
- Global and International History
- Race, Rights and Reform
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Terminology and Language
- Introduction
- 1 Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment
- 2 Anti-imperial Comrades: Black Radicalism and the Communist Possibility
- 3 La vogue nègre: Racial Renaissance at the Intersection of Republic, Empire and Democracy
- 4 Civilization’s Gone to Hell? Revolutionary Poetry, Humanism and the Crisis of Sovereignty
- 5 Give Me Liberty! Black Intellectual Struggles against Fascism in the Fight for Democracy
- 6 “A New Fascism, the American Brand”: Anti-communism, Anti-imperialism and the Struggle for the West
- 7 “The Sword of Damocles”: Présence Africaine and Decolonization in the Face of the Cold War
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the ways that key black intellectuals from the United States and the French imperial nation-state sought to configure the relationships between racial and national belonging and political access to citizenship rights in the immediate aftermath of World War I. While being black meant something different in the respective contexts of the US and France, a shared sense of exclusion on the basis of race brought these thinkers together. More often than not, they also agreed with the United States' President Wilson's vision of the right to self-determination as the province of civilized men, and their activism during this period was motived by a desire to demonstrate that ethnicity was neither a marker of civilizational capacity nor of nationality. Such consensus did not automatically translate to transnational activism nor to international black solidarity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race, Rights and ReformBlack Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War, pp. 14 - 47Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021