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Reviewed by:
  • Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip Muelenbeck
  • Andrew Burtch
Muelenbeck, Philip (ed.) — Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. Pp. 324.

When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential race, commentators from the world over speculated whether his victory signified the end of American racism. Others looked to Obama’s campaign promises of a more moderate American foreign policy, and his administration’s initial forays to the Middle East and Africa [End Page 576] were met with cautious optimism, if not outright excitement. By the end of the 2012 presidential race, it was clear that racism was not confined to the paranoiac “birther” movement, and publics in the Middle East and Africa expressed disappointment that a black president with African heritage had not brought about the hoped-for positive change in international relations. Race had not diminished from the national or international stage.

The collection of essays in Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective makes abundantly clear the extent to which racial attitudes and constructions of identity influenced, and were influenced by events in the Cold War. This collection expands on the works done by United States scholars over the past decade to rigorously examine international history through the racial lens, such as Thomas Borstelmann’s 2001 work, The Cold War and the Color Line. In the American experience of the Cold War, the civil rights struggle was profoundly linked to the process of decolonization in Asia and Africa. United States information agencies and diplomats sought to diminish the impact of negative impression left in many countries by domestic racial inequality, while civil rights and later Black Power advocates looked to newly independent countries for inspiration and broader international support for their cause. For the uninitiated, Michael Krenn’s opening article recapitulates the historic challenge that racism in the United States posed when dealing abroad, and the half-hearted efforts made to improve the American image during the era of decolonization.

The ambitious and largely realized goal of this collection is to demonstrate how the “color line” in the Cold War was in fact global. Perceptions and constructions of race and ethnicity shaped Cold War policies worldwide, and, in turn, the Cold War influenced domestic social, cultural, and political meanings of race and ethnicity. The essays in this volume are divided into four parts. The first section functions as an introduction to race in the context of international relations; the second examines the interplay of race, ethnicity, and decolonization; the third and fourth sections turn the spotlight on the relationship between international and domestic racial politics and ethnic identity, respectively. The subject matter of the essays range from the very beginning of the Cold War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991, and take the reader to hotspots in North America, Africa, Asia, Latin-America, the Mediterranean, and Europe. While the editor regrets that the volume is not “comprehensive”, it is largely representative of the range of conflicts domestic and international that abounded during the Cold War.

The quality of the writing and the scholarship of the essays is very good overall, but a few standout works are particularly careful at parsing domestic and international conceptions of race. For example, Michael Donoghue’s exploration of the 1946 Greaves case in the Panama Canal Zone convincingly shows how the conviction of a black West Indian labourer for the rape of a white American civilian in the Canal Zone paved the way for a decade-long conflict over Cold War security concerns, labour relations, and racial segregation. White authorities used the Greaves case to insist on segregation and a two-tier wage system that preserved white hegemony in the Canal Zone. The West Indian-run Local 713 sought in the aftermath of the case to reform labour relations, eliminate unequal [End Page 577] pay, and unite the West Indian workforce with a resentful Latin Panamanian populace into a broader “national union”. These two forces ran into conflict against a backdrop of virulent anti communism in the United States that gave Zone authorities justification to crush the union, and also unfolded alongside the...

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