Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith (review)

In seven well-written chapters, Thomas E. Smith considers how intellectuals of African descent navigated the global color line between the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Rather than representing a lull in the history of Pan-Africanism, as is suggested in much of the literature, Emancipation without Equality credits this period for producing a generation of intellectuals that challenged racial oppression in pursuit of equal treatment and rights in the colonies and metropoles of the Atlantic world. If Euro-American powers guided the course of imperialism, then African and African-descended people represented a formidable, anti-imperialist response.

Smith begins with a discussion of Pan-African thought as represented by African American intellectuals who, despite their marginalization from the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago and the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, formed a counter-public sphere wherein they interrogated the meaning of American citizenship, condemned white vigilante terrorism, and called for greater control over the Christianizing mission in Africa. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Alexander Crummell, and Booker T. Washington are all discussed as significant in this regard, as are a number of African American women, who, like Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Julia Cooper, pressed for Black inclusion in the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women. Moving across the Atlantic in chapter two, Smith discusses the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as a culminating moment in Pan-African protest. In addition to celebrating Euro-American imperial mastery, this venue featured the "American Negro Exhibit," which ceded space to Thomas Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois to challenge the "Negro problem" school of thought by evidencing African American progress since slavery's abolition. This challenge carried over to the first Pan-African Conference in London, where diaspora intellectuals called for the expansion of rights and equality across the Atlantic world. The ideas and platforms they put forward discredited the ideological underpinnings of the global color line and reflected the influence of positivist currents shaping anti-racist thought during this period.

Smith expands his discussion on the Pan-African critique of Euro-American Christianity in chapter three by focusing on the ideas of religious intellectuals that corresponded with the African American journalist John E. Bruce. While supportive of the civilizationist project in Africa, men like George Washington Williams, Theophilus Scholes, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mojola Agbebi were generally critical of white-led Christianity, seeing it as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism. They instead insisted on a more forceful embrace of political reform and a commitment to vindicating Africa from "Dark Continent" stereotypes that justified the exploitation of Black bodies globally. Emphasis on the correspondence between Africa and the United States continues in chapter four with Smith's examination of the Spanish American War and the South African (Boer) War. Both events were imbued with masculinist meanings by Pan-African intellectuals and looked upon as opportunities to advance claims for rights that essentially remain unrealized.

Smith returns to the World Congress of Representative Women and the Pan-African Conference in chapter five to remind readers that, despite the masculinist nature of Pan-African discourse, women, including several of whom founded the National Association of Colored Women, engaged in advocating for rights for people of African descent. From the trans-Atlantic protests of Ida. B. Wells and Catherine Impey, to the rhetorical responses of Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauline Hopkins, women spoke, wrote, theorized, and organized preambles to action against the global color line. Smith concludes his examination with an analysis of the 1911 Universal Race Congress. In addition to Boas, who is credited with shifting the discourse on race from the realm of biology to culture, the Congress is discussed as significant for announcing the arrival of the Sudanese–Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali. As founder and editor of African Times and Orient...