Internationalist Perspective Research Articles

Dancing to Rock & Roll Poetry

On October 30, 1975—a historical pivot point between 1930s film noir and 1990s gangsta rap— Bay Area poet Nashira Priester introduced to San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Poetry Center audience the city’s latest musical outlaws: the West Coast Gangster Choir, a multi-racial ensemble of vocalists and musicians led by then-emerging poet Jessica Hagedorn. This article chronicles Hagedorn's development as a poet and performer, analyzing the cultural and political work done by the Gangster Choir as a Third World movement with an internationalist perspective on local issues.

Imperialism and Capitalist Development in Marx’s Capital

AbstractThis article aims at contributing to current debates on the ‘new imperialism’ by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx’sCapitalin light of his writings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or – correspondingly – an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the laws of development of capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, to expand and increase the exploitation of workers worldwide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later defined as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of ‘globalisation’ of the capital of the dominant states. With the development of his analysis, Marx became increasingly aware of the economic and political consequences of imperialism. In his activity within the First International, with regard to the question of Irish independence, he affirmed the fundamental importance of building a real solidarity between class struggles in imperialist countries and anti-colonial resistance in colonised and dependent countries. His examination of imperialism and internationalist perspective were downplayed, denied, if not completely reversed in the interpretation and systematisation of his thought by reformist leaders within the Second International. In their attempt to react against this tendency and develop an analysis and a political strategy adequate to the new phase of generalised imperialist expansion, increased inter-imperialist rivalries and rising anti-colonial resistance, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin reaffirmed the centrality of the critique of imperialism at the economic and at the political levels. Even if they were partially unaware of this, they thus developed and expanded on some aspects already present in Marx’s work.

The Black Chicago renaissance

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. This book analyzes this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working-class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. The chapters discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and place the development of black culture in a national and international context. The chapters also provoke explorations of renaissances in other cities. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, <italic>The Chicago Defender</italic> and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940.

Between West and non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought

This article seeks to highlight the significant contribution of Latin American scholarship to the further promotion and understanding of more ‘global’ approaches to International Relations. It focuses on the immediate post-independence period and explores the internationalist perspective of Andres Bello, an enormously influential continental scholar, publicist, and political figure, whose work is little known outside South America. It argues that his contribution to International Relations broadly conceived, part of a wider regional contribution, cannot be neatly accommodated within either accounts of the expansion of international society or revisionist post-colonial thought. As such it is neither fully ‘Western’ nor ‘non-Western’. Analysing his contribution under three interrelated headings - international law, the problem of order and international co-operation - it argues that Bello's work needs to be examined on its own terms. Above all it provides an illustration of why we need to take more seriously Latin American thought as part of a wider movement to internationalise International Relations.

Tax Competition and Inequality: The Case for Global Tax Governance

Abstract This article presents the normative case for global tax governance. Contrary to an influential part of the literature, national tax policy choices cause significant externalities for other nation-states. Focusing on business taxation, the article shows that tax competition undermines the integrity and distributive principles of domestic tax systems and aggravates the inequality between developed and developing countries. Further, it demonstrates that the effects of international tax competition are unjust irrespective of whether a globalist or less demanding internationalist perspective on justice is adopted. The minimum requirement of justice is to devise global rules that ensure that national tax systems remain capable of implementing distributive justice as they see fit. Finally, the article presents and discusses a concrete proposal for the global governance of business tax competition, namely, unitary taxation with formula apportionment.

Looking Out and Looking In:Reconciling Domestic and Internationalist Considerations in the Enforcement and Review of Arbitration Awards in Canada

IN MANY ways, Canada is in a favourable position within the international commercial arbitration community, given its bijuridical, bilingual, and multicultural heritage. In addition, Canada is generally a favourable jurisdiction with respect to the enforcement of arbitral awards, recognising the necessity of according deference to arbitral awards and respecting the intentions of the parties who agreed to resolve any disputes by way of arbitration in the first place. The question of enforcement in Canada is not entirely free from complication, however. Occasionally courts struggle with how to reconcile the express instructions of the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (‘Model Law’) with principles of Canadian law which might otherwise apply in the domestic context. Such concerns become acute in the question of the review of arbitral awards, the enforcement of such awards, and identifying the limitation periods, if any, which apply to the enforcement of an award. These tensions came to a head in the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision of Yugraneft Corp . v. Rexx Management Corp . (‘ Yugraneft ’),1 which addressed the question of what limitation period, if any, would apply to the enforcement of an international commercial arbitral award in Canada. The Court concluded that the limitation period for the granting of a remedial order, namely, two years, applied to the enforcement of an international commercial arbitral award. In so doing, the Court attempted to adopt an internationalist perspective with respect to the Model Law, while at the same time adopting a robust interpretation of Alberta's limitation regime. ### (a) Canadian Courts are Faithful to Deference Mandated by Model Law Canadian law is consistent in holding that the reasons to review an award pursuant to Article 34 of the Model Law and to refuse enforcement of an award under Article 36 of the Model Law are to be narrowly construed.2 One Canadian decision has …

Fred Halliday (1946-2010)

Fred Halliday exercised a quite extraordinary influence over all those who knew him – as friends, colleagues and students. The wider world, especially the part of it that used to be known as the ‘Third World’, really was his oyster. Beginning with two visits to Iran, one just before and one during his Oxford undergraduate years, followed by his travels inside Yemen and Omani Dhofar with a Lebanese fellow student, Fawwaz Trabulsi, in the late 1960s, he always seemed to have been somewhere first, to have summed up the situation there before I or those with similar interests had even begun to put a few first incoherent thoughts about it together. This was what he was later to call ‘doing the work’, that is going about, learning the languages (a remarkable number in his case), networking, collecting information and putting it all into some larger political and internationalist perspective. It often involved great physical risks, the more so as he soon became something of a marked man, the bane of the diehard British imperialists who fought tooth and nail to prevent the publication of his first book, Arabia Without Sultans (1975), as well as of many Third World dictators, not to speak of their radical successors like the Ayatullah Khomeini whose agents had him briefly detained in Teheran just after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 Richard T. Chu (bio) Gregor Benton. Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945. London: Routledge, 2007. xvi. 170 pp. Hardcover $180.00, ISBN 978-0-415-41868-3. A popular trend in Chinese diasporic studies these days is to study modern Chinese transnationals who are mostly merchant capitalists. Benton’s book, therefore, is somewhat of a novelty because it deals with different subjects: Chinese workers, students, and small traders. But more than just being about another group of people, the book also goes against the trend by utilizing an internationalist perspective to study Chinese diasporic subjects. In utilizing such a framework, the book avoids what its author regards as a paradox in transnational studies, where one “path” undermines “cultural essentialism and determinism” while another emphasizes primordial ties (p. 2). Instead, “internationalism” focuses on the shared humanity of people and envisages the world as an “unbounded worldwide society of collectives,” hence, transcending the limits of the transnationalist paradigm (p. 2). Although past scholars have used an internationalist perspective to study the Chinese diaspora, their works often portray the Chinese as passive observers and beneficiaries of others’ internationalism, thus perpetrating Chinese stereotypes of being “clannish, unassimilable, xenophobic, and deeply introverted” (p. 1). Benton’s work differs from such earlier studies by depicting its subjects as active participants in the labor and social-revolutionary internationalist movements around the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it describes these actors as “transethnic,” that is, capable of forming alliances with both Chinese and non-Chinese alike. The book is arranged into nine chapters. In the introductory chapter, Benton gives an overview of his framework, arguments, and methodologies, as well as a historical background of the internationalist movements (e.g., the establishment of the First, Second, and Third International and the rise of the anarchists) and Chinese participation in them. In the next six chapters, he provides an account of Chinese involvement in these movements in different locales; Russia (chapter 2), Germany (chapter 3), Cuba (chapter 4), Britain/Europe (chapter 5), Spain (chapter 6), and Australia (chapter 7). In these chapters, rich in details, the reader finds certain recurrent themes pertaining to the internationalist movements. One theme centers on how internationalist organizations regarded the Chinese with [End Page 310] alternating views of acceptance and prejudice. For example, Britain’s National Union of Seamen, influenced by the divide-and-rule tactics of British authorities and shipping companies, in general supported, but only perfunctorily, the Chinese Seamen’s Union fight for equal pay and treatment (pp. 59–60). Another theme found in the book is how Chinese migrants demonstrated great capacity to transcend narrow political and ethnic boundaries. For instance, in Spain the Chinese volunteered to join the International Brigades to fight Franco’s forces. In Cuba and in Australia, a number of Chinese workers also intermarried with local women and formed close relationships with other non-Chinese. Chapter 8 focuses on the Esperanto movement and describes the support Chinese internationalists in Japan and France gave to the movement and the ensuing debates in China about the merits of adopting a universal language. The book concludes with a summary of the main contributions of the author’s work. It also explains why studies of Chinese radicals and their involvement in internationalist movements have been neglected in the past. One reason for this was the collapse of the Comintern and the rise of the Chinese revolution that led scholars to focus more on China’s nationalist movement. Finally, Benton also points out that internationalism and transnationalism are not mutually exclusive, but form a continuum. However, he argues that a patriotism suffused by internationalism is more preferable to an extreme form of transnationalism that oftentimes relegates the interests of humanity secondary in importance to self-interest. If there is an area that the book lacks, it is a glossary to guide readers un-familiar with the different names, events, or organizations associated with the internationalist movement. The book could also use some photographs or images to provide the readers with a more visceral feel of the subject matter. However, these deficiencies are easily overlooked because of...

Tax Competition and Inequality - The Case for Global Tax Governance

In this article I present the normative case for global tax governance. I argue that, contrary to an influential part of the literature, national tax policy choices cause significant externalities for other nation states. Focusing in business taxation, I show that tax competition undermines the integrity and distributive principles of domestic tax systems, and aggravates the inequality between developed and developing countries. Further, I demonstrate that the effects of international tax competition are unjust irrespective of whether a globalist or less demanding internationalist perspective on justice is adopted. The minimum requirement of justice is to devise global rules which ensure that national tax systems remain capable to implement distributive justice as they see fit. Finally, I present and discuss a concrete proposal for the global governance of business tax competition, namely, unitary taxation with formula apportionment.

Griffith Taylor's Antarctica: science, sentiment, and politics

ABSTRACTGriffith Taylor (1880–1963) was a scientific member of theTerra Novaexpedition. Although he published initially on his geomorphological, glaciological and meteorological research, conducted between 1910 and 1912, he was also a teacher, lecturer, publicist and later political commentator on Antarctica. Initially a loyal ‘Britisher’ he developed an internationalist perspective on Antarctica without compromising his self-promotional ambitions. Through his professional career in Australia, the US and Canada over the early to mid twentieth century Antarctica's shifting scientific, cultural and political history can be mapped. Just as self-interest permeated the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, so Taylor's ambitions persisted as he fashioned himself into a scientific prophet for peace. Taylor's Antarctica, an amalgam of sentiment and science, rivalry and cooperation, imperialism and internationalism, popular culture and global politics, was the twentieth century's Antarctica.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater and an anti-colonial, internationalist anthropology

In 1920 W.E.B. Du Bois's Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil issued a call for an anti-colonial, internationalist approach to historical and social science scholar? ship. At a time when anthropology's institutional stance as the science of localized and isolated "primitive" cultures was still being forged, Darkwater offered an alternate mapping of the discipline, one centered on an understanding of capitalism as a racialized, interconnected global system that continually produced inequality and difference. It should not surprise us that Boasian anthropologists at the time shunted aside Du Bois's proposals. After all, Boas himself actively ignored the vociferous struggles of indigenous cannery workers for decent wages and unions while he conducted his fieldwork among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast. Nor should it surprise us that the relational approach of Du Bois, an African-American scholar speaking from the social and disciplinary margins, is still largely ignored today. But if Darkwater's path-breaking proposals were actively marginalized within hegemonic anthropology, their influence is continually registered, if unacknowledged or even forgotten, within a loosely conceived tradition of radical anthropology. Of course, Du Bois is not alone in his exclusion. Many important scholars who helped shape an anti-colonial and internationalist perspective in

Introduction: New Black Power Studies: National, International, and Transnational Perspectives

movement for represented in many ways a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States and other parts of the African world. And whereas the campaigns in the United States to end legal segregation and to advance black civil rights have been the subject of scholarly analysis for several decades, Black Power Studies is an emerging subfield in African and African American Studies and in the history of the African Diaspora. And even at this early stage of scholarly research and interpretation, certain themes and trends have emerged in the examination of the Black Power Movement (BPM), especially regarding continuities and discontinuities with earlier social, political, and cultural movements among African-descended people. This Special Issue of Journal of African American History presents Black Power which document those characteristics shared with earlier black social movements as well as those organizations, activities, and leaders who arrived on the political and cultural scene only in the late 1960s and 1970s. (1) Scholars have already described the preoccupation with Africa and African affairs on the part of Black Power groups such as Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity, Maulana Karenga's US Organization, the Republic of New Africa; the advocates for the creation of Black Studies programs; and Stokely Carmichael and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members in the late 1960s. (2) Fanon Che Wilkins in his essay The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965 presents a well-documented account of the relations between the black student activists and Africa in the 1960s. James Forman, who served as SNCC Executive Secretary beginning in early 1961, had been involved in African Studies from his undergraduate years when he studied with social scientist St. Clair Drake at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Forman established the connections between SNCC and the Pan African Students Organization in the Americas and other international student organizations, and coordinated joint protests and other activities with African students and diplomats in the United States. 1964 trip of eleven SNCC members to Africa solidified the relationships between the newly independent African nations and African Americans, and laid the groundwork for increased international activities in the Black Power era in the late 1960s. Black Power era witnessed not only a cultural and artistic revolution among African-descended people in various parts of the world, but also the appearance of a wide variety of new black publications, including Black Scholar, First World (magazine), Journal of Black Studies, and Review of Black Political Economy, founded in 1970 by economist Robert S. Browne. (3) In her essay An African-Vietnamese American: Robert S. Browne, the Antiwar Movement, and the Personal/Political Dimensions of Black Internationalism, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu examines the unique internationalist perspective that Browne brought to the movement for Black Power. Browne not only lived and worked in Southeast Asia for the U.S. government in the 1950s, he also married a woman of Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry. When nationwide protests erupted in the late 1960s over the U.S. war in Vietnam, Browne emerged as the authentic African Vietnamese voice in numerous antiwar campaigns and protests. Wu documents Browne's activities in support of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam long before that stance was taken by other civil rights and Black Power leaders and organizations. As Browne pointed out, I was the one Black who had been connected with [the antiwar] movement before prominent Blacks like Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Dick Gregory eventually spoke out. movement for Black Power emerged in the United States in 1966 and eventually spread internationally to the Caribbean and South America, and in South Africa with the launching of the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steven Biko. …

Reply to My Critic(s)

My recent book, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unex ceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and iden tity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be sub jected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called false universalism are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fun damentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidar ities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of

Museums and Cultural Property: A Retreat from the Internationalist Approach

Responding to J. H. Merryman's discussion of cultural property internationalism in the preceding IJCP issue, this article examines the currency of the internationalist perspective within the museum community. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence of adherence to an internationalist perspective, at least among the official policies and publications of museums and museum organizations. The article proposes that the current dissociation with cultural internationalism in the acquisitions arena signals an important shift, and bears significant long-term consequences for many museums.

Academic Freedom as a Human Right: An Internationalist Perspective

The university as a transnational community of professors and students poses challenges to traditional conceptions of academic freedom. What if we rethought academic freedom as part of a human right to education?

English Only and U.S. College Composition

In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.

English Only and U.S. College Composition

In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.

The A to Z of world development

Compiled by the New Internationalist editorial team, this is a reference work providing a comprehensive overview of the main ideas and issues in global development over the last 25 years. The book covers 624 different topics, reflecting the New Internationalist perspective on aid, development, the environment, economics, international politics, and international figures. Succinct summaries for each entry are supported by colour photographs, charts, graphs and illustrations.

Competing Rationales for Canadian Development Assistance

ETHICAL VALUES AND CANADIAN DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCEAfter 1945, a cosmopolitan dimension gradually became a feature of the political cultures of most industrialized societies as they came to accept that they had obligations to promote basic human rights beyond their borders and to aid the development of the world's poorest peoples and countries. However, the attachment of most governments to these obligations has never been other than fragile,(f.1) and their impact on public policy has often been overshadowed by national interest imperatives, both economic and political. Nevertheless, from a human perspective, the emergence of a cosmopolitan ethic that asserts in particular an international obligation to advance basic human rights and to promote the development needs of the poorest is a significant development.(f.2)By the mid-1960s, Canada had begun to respond more than minimally to these newer obligations, and, until quite recently, the official rhetoric of the Canadian government located the objective of its development assistance squarely within the emerging cosmopolitan ethic. Both major cabinet-endorsed policy statements on Canadian aid between 1975 and 1993 defined the primary objective of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in humanitarian rather than commercial, political, or security terms.(f.3) This was also the judgment of Canadian parliamentarians on the four important occasions between 1980 and 1994 when committees of parliament gave detailed consideration to Canadian aid policies.(f.4) During the same period, public opinion overwhelmingly held to the view that the primary purpose of aid programmes should be to help the development efforts of the poorest countries and peoples.(f.5) A recent professionally sophisticated poll demonstrates that public support for development assistance remains surprisingly strong, and for essentially ethical reasons.(f.6)Those who embrace the humane internationalist perspective have always recognized, indeed stressed, that development assistance was in Canada's long-term political and economic interest. Foreign aid can reasonably be expected to contribute to a healthy global economy and to a less strife-riven world, both of which are clearly to Canada's advantage. Nevertheless, the primary motive behind foreign aid was and should remain humanitarian rather than the pursuit of any national interests, economic, political, or security. Mitchell Sharp made the point over 25 years ago: 'if the purpose of aid is to help ourselves rather than to help others, we shall probably receive in return what we deserve and a good deal less than we expect.(f.7)DOMESTIC INFLUENCES ON CIDA POLICIESThe emergence of a substantial Canadian aid programme did not happen in isolation from domestic politics in Canada. The programme simultaneously reflected the major shift in social values that had, in the same era, led to the development of extensive social welfare programmes in Canada without, however, challenging that particular responsiveness of public policy to corporate interests which is a feature of the Canadian political system.(f.8) The interaction of these influences meant that transplanting liberal welfare values to foreign policy through an expanded aid programme quickly encountered powerful pressures from within government and from the corporate sector for the aid programme to promote other foreign policy objectives, including, in particular, the advancement of Canadian trade interests. Thus from its early years, CIDA was, in the words which open the most comprehensive parliamentary review of Canadian aid policies ever undertaken, 'beset by a confusion of purpose.(f.9)For many years there has been a struggle inside government between those who want to ensure that CIDA is ever more responsive to trade and other foreign policy objectives and those, primarily within CIDA, who want to limit the erosion of CIDA's putative primary focus on helping the poorest peoples and countries. …

Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the "End of Race"

For a number of reasons, Langston Hughes's radical poetry, the bulk of which he wrote between 1932-1938, has received little scholarly attention and hasyet to make its way into many anthologies of American literature (with the notable exception of a few poems in the vanguard second and third editions of The Heath Anthology of American Literature). The origins of this benign and not-so-benign neglect lie in Hughes's own retrospective ambivalence toward his earlier radical activities and poetry. As early as 1940 he substantially repressed the memory of his involvement with the proletarian literary movement in his autobiography, The Big Sea. And we can surmise that the hostile recovery of this memory by none than House on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the 1950s did little to encourage Hughes to include his explicitly red poetry in his Selected Poems (1959). But Hughes's repression of his radical poetry in the 1940s and 1950s was only one symptom of a debilitating neurosis in American society: that all-too familiar Cold War fear of the radical other and its shadow, that even deeper fear of one's own un-American impulses. Of course, writers rarely exercise power over the public reception of their work, and Hughes was no exception. The repression--that is, exclusion--of proletarian literature from academic canons was in large part a New Critical achievement; 1930s radical poetry was disqualified as poetry, since it was not--nor ever aimed to be--self-referential. With a few exceptions, scholarship on Hughes's poetry tends to dismiss the works of this period because they don't measure up to aesthetic standards, or, as Arnold Rampersad has written, because they fail to express the essential identity (40) of the black American. After all, they embrace an internationalist perspective that is critical of the black nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideology attributed to his earlier Harlem Renaissance poems. The neglect of Hughes's radical poetry is unfortunate. He ought to be considered one of the first American poets effectively to challenge the post-World War I ethnic nationalism that to some extent informed the politics of the Harlem Renaissance, including some of his own early poetry; as well as that which fueled European fascism. More specifically, Hughes's internationalist poetry aims dialectically to preserve and transcend the categories of race and nation in order to overcome the fragmentation of global working class struggles. This effort may not have produced what some of us would deem formally or tonally beautiful works, but if Hughes chose to sacrifice artistry for politics, it was not because the two are mutually exclusive but because the blues aesthetic of his early poems embraced a form of nationalism he could no longer abide. Ironically, then, Hughes's work during the 1930s speaks directly to those who would dismiss it, challenging us to look more critically at current efforts to reclaim a black nationalist literary aesthetic, and prodding us, perhaps, to rethink the historical relationships between poetics and politics. 1 To understand Hughes's challenge we must first consider the construction, emergence, and ultimate hegemony of nationalism in the years following the first World War, as well as its effects on Hughes's early aesthetic theory. Many contemporary thinkers have convincingly shown that nationalism is a shifting concept, at times defined by the possession of a common language, territory, race, ethnicity, religion, psychology, and so forth. Benedict Anderson's conceptualization of nationality as an imagined community aptly underscores its fictive character. After 1880, nationalism became increasingly defined by an ethnic-linguistic criterion: if a number of people could claim a common ethnicity or race and language, then they could constitute a nation. Another important feature of modern nationalism has been its hostility to its antithesis, or better, nemesis: internationalism. …