Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Date: 

Tuesday, November 27, 2018, 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262)

"Making the Internal Colony: Black Internationalism, Development, and the Politics of Colonial Comparison in the Postwar United States"

Speaker:

Sam Klug, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University.

Contact:

Ilana Freedman
ifreedman@g.harvard.edu

Chairs:

Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract:

How did the central transformation of the international order in the twentieth century—the decolonization of European empires—affect the way Americans thought and talked about their own country? During and after the Second World War, the grounds of comparison between the United States and the decolonizing world became an important political issue in American public life. Was the United States the "first new nation," as many politicians and social scientists had it, or was it the site of "internal colonialism," as African Americans increasingly contended during the Black Power era? This presentation explores how competing ways of comparing the United States with the decolonizing world influenced debates about the design of international institutions during the Second World War, international development theory and policy in the early Cold War, social policy during the Great Society, and African American activism in the civil rights and Black Power era. Bringing together intellectual, political, and social movement history, it retells the story of the relationship between postwar American liberalism and the black freedom movement as a struggle over the meaning of decolonization.