Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India by Nico Slate (review)

Although many parts of U.S. history have been illuminated by the new adoption of transnational methods, the subfield of African-American history has proved to be an especially fruitful object of study in this regard. That is because black thinkers, perennially unsure of their footing within the nation, frequently looked abroad toward other solidarities. Some of those solidarities have been diasporic; the idea of a “black Atlantic,” tying together the political projects of thinkers of African descent throughout the Atlantic world, is now widely accepted. But we are increasingly coming to realize that many have not been. African Americans were as eager to forge connections with peoples who shared their condition of oppression as with those who shared their ancestral background. And no place outside of Africa commanded so much of their attention in the twentieth century as India, the world’s largest colony and the site of the world’s most prominent independence movement.

That there has been some connection between African Americans and Indians is common knowledge: it was with Gandhian tactics, after all, that Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Southern civil rights movement. But Slate shows that King’s adoption of Gandhian nonviolence was only one of a series of engagements between the two groups throughout the twentieth century. Operating within a broad framework of “colored cosmopolitanism,” major figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Washington Carver, Lala Lajpat Rai, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru understood U.S. blacks and South Asians to be joined in a struggle of the colored peoples of the earth against racism and empire. More than just a strategic alliance of those sharing a common enemy, colored cosmopolitanism was, in many cases, a transformative engagement that encouraged its participants to transcend their specific ancestral heritages even as they affirmed the structural importance of racism.

What is surprising is how powerful this project was. The story of colored cosmopolitanism includes the most prominent Indian nationalists and African-American race leaders. Du Bois, and his famous proposition that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” lies at the center of the project and Slate shows how deep Du Bois’s commitment to incorporating India into the global struggle against racism ran (Du Bois published a novel in 1928, Dark Princess, about a romance between an African American medical student and a maharaja’s daughter). But India was of interest to Garvey as well, and his followers in the United States supplied the main constituency for the India-derived Ahmadi Islam movement there. On the other end, Booker T. Washington was an important reference point for Gandhi, just as Du Bois was for the untouchable leader B. R. Ambedkar and for the Eurasian race theorist Cedric Dover. Readers will appreciate the chapter on World War II, when both blacks and Indians looked to each other for support in their complicated and connected “double victory” campaigns against fascism and racism/empire.

Slate finds much to admire in colored cosmopolitanism, which he regards as a judicious compromise between abstract universalism and narrow-minded particularism. But Slate’s eyes are not blinded by the stars and, to his great credit, he offers a penetrating analysis of the impediments, complications, and structural constraints facing this international racial solidarity. In the first place, he notes, there was no guarantee that Indians and African Americans would see themselves as sharing a “colored” identity. Some African Americans understandably felt that a large cultural gulf stood between them and the people of South Asia. On the Indian side, it was common for upper-caste Hindus in the early part of the twentieth century to describe themselves as having an Aryan and, therefore, Caucasian genetic heritage—a conclusion endorsed by the race science of the time. Thus for men like Jawaharlal Nehru and Paul Robeson to regard themselves as racial...