The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover

Abstract

Nico Slate explores the evolution of twentieth-century “colored cosmopolitanism,” an intellectual movement to unify the “colored world” around shared experiences of exploitation and oppression, through the lens of Cedric Dover's transnational intellectual and artistic circles (pp. 17, 19). Observing how African Americans represented “a racial minority within the United States but a racial majority within the colored world,” Dover (1904–1961), a scholar and Indian nationalist of mixed-race ancestry from Calcutta, advocated “colored solidarity” as a tool for antiracist, anti-imperialist activism to achieve social justice on a global scale (p. 141). Seeking inspiration and friendship from African American intellectuals, Dover taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and cultivated personal and professional relationships with notable African American authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson. Dover eventually settled in London, England, and promoted the “colored” world through his extensive correspondence, publications, and library collection, which was carefully compiled and interpreted with extra-illustrations to build “a literary canon … for all colored people” (p. 190). Rather than framing this volume as a “traditional biography,” however, Slate focuses on Dover's scholarship and the “intellectual, often academic conversations” he shared with other “colored” activists, artists, and national leaders to explore the promises and limitations of Dover's brand of colored cosmopolitanism (p. 9).