"The Anticolonial Imagination" is an examination of race, migration, politics, and the history of ideas in the interwar period (1919-1939). Based on archival material collected in Russia and the United States, the dissertation analyzes the political and cultural expressions of a small group of African Americans and Asian Americans whotraveled to Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s to work and to study in institutions administered by the Communist International (Comintern). This group included African American writers, West Indian Pan-Africanists, Japanese American socialists, and Indian revolutionaries. Through an examination of these sojourners' exilic activism and cultural productions, I demonstrate the ways in which anticolonialists attempted to place issues of anti-racism and self-determination at the center of the international Communistmovement, much to the chagrin of American authorities and the European powers.This study contributes to several interrelated areas of research. First, the dissertation advances a new angle of approach for studies of race and foreign affairs by excavating the history of the Soviet Union in the struggle against colonialism in the period before World War Two. Second, this study reconstructs how migrant activists of the interwar period attempted to unite the ideological impulses of nativist anticolonialism and proletarian fraternalism in innovative ways that cut across political space and diasporic boundaries. Lastly, for scholars of American politics, "The Anticolonial Imagination" reveals a rich set of political and cultural visions that were decisively eliminated in the post-war repression that corresponded to the creation of the National Security State. By recovering the voices of those who were silenced, marginalized and forgotten, the manuscript provides for a better understanding of the political and racial ordering that occurred during the early Cold War.
Mukherji, Ani,
"The Anticolonial Imagination: The Exilic Productions of American Radicalism in Interwar Moscow"
(2011).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z05H7DH4
