Reflections of freedom

Description

Drawing on a range of published and unpublished sources from archives in India, Britain, and the United States, this dissertation charts the efforts of diverse historical actors--some well-known and others largely forgotten--to unite the freedom struggles of South Asians and African Americans. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, South Asians and African Americans learned from each other in ways that not only advanced their respective struggles for freedom, but also helped define what freedom could and should mean. This transnational exchange did not entail the clean transfer of ideas, practices, or identities. Rather, a bi-directional process of self-transformation through self-recognition bridged struggles that were themselves internally diverse. Looking abroad and seeing oneself involved reflection in both senses of the word--a partial mirroring and a great amount of thought and practice. This work focuses on the evolution and political significance of two analogies--one comparing African Americans with all colonized subjects of the British Raj and the other comparing African Americans with Dalits ("Untouchables"). These analogies, always political, increasingly became enmeshed in global power politics, especially during the Second World War and the Cold War. While assessing the elisions and missed opportunities involved in analogizing disparate social and political movements, this dissertation argues that an unrecognized continuity of exchange linked African Americans and South Asians in opposition to what many understood as the intersection of racism, imperialism, and oppressions based on caste, class, and gender. Analyzing these historical exchanges, this thesis contributes to scholarly debates regarding diaspora, cosmopolitanism, racial formation, anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalisms, nonviolent civil disobedience, Afro-Indian solidarity, the origins of the Third World, and the relationship between the Cold War and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Subjects