Colored Cosmopolitanism

Reviews / Votes

Slate exhaustively charts the liberation movements of the world's two largest democracies from the 19th century to the 1960s. There's more to this connection than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s debt to Mahatma Gandhi, and Slate tells this fascinating tale better than anyone ever has. -- Tony Norman Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 20111230 From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, Indians and African-Americans found common ground in their fights against colonialism on one side of the world and racism on the other...Gandhi's influence on Martin Luther King Jr., the most celebrated of his disciples of non-violence, garners surprisingly few pages here. Instead of traveling down this well-trod path, the author delves deeper into how Gandhi's African-American contemporaries, such as civil rights stalwarts Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois influenced the Indian leader, precipitating a profound reworking of his thinking on both caste and race. Engagingly-written, this sweeping account of these episodes in U.S. and Indian history has the ability to appeal to professional historians as well as general readers. Publishers Weekly 20120213 Since the mid-1990s, U.S. scholars have sought to understand the international factors that shaped the U.S. civil rights movements. Within the last decade, transnational studies of the civil rights and Black Power movements have emerged and emphasized the connections between black activists within the African diaspora. Slate breaks new ground by unearthing a "hidden history" of solidarity between anticolonial activists in India and black civil rights activists in the U.S. during the 20th century. The author argues that Indian and black activists were able to transcend physical distance, differing sociohistorical environments, and racial difference (albeit imperfectly) through a shared vision of "global double victory" for the "darker races." Slate does more than provide a fresh history of the Indian anticolonial movement and the U.S. civil rights movement; his seminal contribution is his development of a nuanced conceptual framework for later historians to apply to studying other transnational social movements. -- K. K. Hill Choice 20120701