Bibliography: #DCAQR458

key	DCAQR458
title	"One World Or None" : Transnational Struggles Against Imperialism in the American Century
author	Khaghani, Leah Victoria
item type	Thesis
publication year	2011
date	2011
abstract note	"One World Or None" chronicles the tradition of transnational anti-racist and anti-imperial activist networks over key twentieth century moments. These moments were marked by international conferences, such as the 1911 First Universal Races Congress in London, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the 1936 International Conference of Negroes and Arabs in Paris - held as part of the Popular Front resistance to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia - and the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, which were organized in response to international crises in an effort to secure lasting peace. Black and Middle Eastern intellectuals - along with other racialized and colonized activists and their white American and European sympathizers - saw opportunities for world transformation in these dark moments, and seized on these conferences as platforms to articulate and effectuate their vision for the planet. The predominant vision of these activists critiqued and transcended the universal humanism that Western imperial powers used to rationalize the world order. These activists understood that peace for all the planet's people could not be achieved if racism, imperialism and sexism that underwrote Western Enlightenment's universal humanism continued to structure social, economic and political relationships. Therefore, they proposed and actively worked toward an all-inclusive planetary humanism that dismantled racist and imperial tendencies by valuing all people for their inherent humanity. The moments that structure my narrative are examined through perspectives of activists - as communicated through their writings and organizational documents - like the African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, the Egyptian anti-imperial journalist, Duse Mohamed Ali, the Syrian American writer, Ameen Rihani, and the African American feminist educator, Mary McLeod Bethune, among many others. In each chapter, I focus on what drew these planetary humanists to the particular event, their relationship to its unfolding, and how the moment shaped their activism and larger struggles. I focus on two groups - people of African and Middle Eastern descent - because their relationship to the United States was integrally wrought by Western imperialism and its underlying doctrine of universal humanism. These groups have seldom been conceived as central to these events that are chronicled in my dissertation, and the interrelatedness of their activism has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. My work concentrates on the nexus between postcolonial theory and history, as the intellectuals I discuss coupled their interventions into the theoretical doctrines that structured racist imperial hierarchies with actions taken to undermine this dominance. Likewise, "One World Or None" narrates a transnational history of the twentieth century. This research straddles the boundaries between U.S. and world history, much as the activists I study negotiated the borders between "here" and "over there," in both their intellectual relationships and their personal experience of migration and exile.
number pages	vii, 595
publisher	Yale University
place	Hartford, CT
language	English
manual tags	IMPERIALISM; RACISM; 'ABDU'L-BAHA; UNIVERSAL RACES CONGRESS; WORLD UNITY; SEXISM

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