AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE INTERNATIONAL IMAGINARY: GERALD HORNE’S PROGRESSIVE VISION

Abstract

The figure of W. E. B. Du Bois has become exemplary model for black scholars in United States and beyond. Historian Gerald Horne numbers among those who have captured some of Du Bois's sensibility--his learning, his energy and self-discipline, and his commitment to progressive transformation of society. African American Studies, in his hands, is a discipline that interrogates presumptions of West, especially its claims to order, reason, and stability, through recovery of complex narratives of resistance to racism and imperialism. At a moment in time when we paying price for disastrous, accreted choices made by political and economic elites, Horne's histories serve to remind us of what we have forgotten or never known: richness and diversity of African American history, its global presence, and its participation in worldwide chronicles of freedom and resistance. The primacy of nation-state has tended to obscure transnational mobility and ubiquity of African Americans. The desire to recover this occluded history has led Horne to extensive international, multi-archival research and exhaustive study of secondary material. This scholarship, uncontained by national frontiers, joins concerns of other scholars who raise questions about ability of national histories to adequately frame and delineate transnational movements. Richard Iton has written, the ability of actors in cultural realm, intentionally and at times inadvertently, to resist definition of politics as solely that which happens within state borders, or in name of nation, represents a significant means by which these norms might be denaturalized. Horne's exegesis of a global history of racism unconfined by particular practices of specific empires but deployed by all, escapes strictures of national history and preserves contours of a transcendent global black presence. This is Iton's illusory but meaningful space between national and imperial, where black subjects understood broadly made, and where are to be found those most likely to recognize convenient disarticulation of liberal and colonial regimes and their representation as benign and past tense, respectively. (1) When Home occupies this space, he succeeds in defeating presumption that African American experiences and worldview can be neatly contained within U.S. borders. International activism has been a strategy that African-descended people have employed historically to address their oppression in United States. By skillfully uncovering these activities, Horne has made it virtually impossible to revive a reformist and purely domestic African American history. He has debunked idea that African American pursuits abroad were only rhetorical, or that they met with few positive responses from other peoples of color. Substantial evidence of many kinds of collaboration across racial and ethnic lines, including some that were egregious, is richly compiled in Black and Brown: African Americans and Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920 (2005); The End of Empires: African Americans and India (2008); and The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in South Seas after Civil War (2007), and other works. (2) Several themes pervade these texts and Home's exhaustively researched and eclectic body of work generally. One of them is contention that ideological conformity of U.S. civil rights leaders indirectly helped sustain anti-communism and rationalize continued political repression in Third World as well as in United States. For example, era of African American collaboration with India, Home argues, ended soon after 1947 as black leaders were forced to accept official Cold War vilification of India as a Soviet ally. He describes victory of Cold War liberalism over radicalism as one in which white elites conceded to African Americans on question of color in exchange for their support of centrist public policies, but fatally damaged African Americans' class position through attacks on militant trade unions that had defended their right to a decent living. …