Race, Rights and Reform Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War Global and International History Series

Sarah C. Dunstan constructs a narrative of black struggles for rights and citizenship that spans most of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of people and movements from France and the United States, the French Caribbean and African colonies. She explores how black scholars and activists grappled with the connections between culture, race and citizenship and access to rights, mapping African American and Francophone black intellectual collaborations from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the March on Washington in 1963. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, Dunstan situates key black intellectuals in a transnational framework. She reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals simultaneously constituted and reconfigured notions of Western civilization.

Introduction; 1. Black is a country, n'est-ce pas? Race, rights and nation in the Wilsonian moment; 2. Anti-Imperial comrades: black radicalism and the communist possibility; 3. La vogue nègre: racial renaissance at the intersection of republic, empire and democracy; 4. Civilization's gone to hell? Revolutionary poetry, humanism and the crisis of sovereignty; 5. Give me liberty!: Black intellectual struggles against fascism in the fight for democracy; 6. 'A new fascism, the American brand': anti-communism, anti-imperialism and the struggle for the west; 7. 'The Sword of Damocles': Présence Africaine and decolonization in the face of the Cold War; Epilogue.

Sarah C. Dunstan is a historian of twentieth-century France and the United States, focusing on questions of race, rights and gender. Sarah C. Dunstan is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University London.