Description
Book SynopsisIn White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.
Trade ReviewDefying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice.
-- Carol Polsgrove * American Historical Review *
The book stands out for how it critiques how institutions reproduce, often in an unconscious manner, the foundational assumptions of an academic discipline.... Vitalis has also contributed to the vibrant and expanding scholarly study of radical Black transnational intellectual history by engaging with a largely-overlooked dimension of the work of important figures in the history of Black radical thought such as Locke, Williams and Bunche, showing how those thinkers worked within and against formal academic structures to criticize the racist and imperialist dynamics of international relations scholarship.
* National Polticial Science Review *
Robert Vitalis wants his discipline to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a willful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order. If international relations scholars want to understand the racial politics that made their field what it is today, there is no better place to begin than with this righteously angry book.
-- Susan Pederson * London Review of Books *
There is much to commend in Vitalis' book which is filled with fascinating vignettes and unexpected connections. He writes with clarity and passion, especially in the book's opening and close, to ensure that whilst ample room is given for the reader to make their own way through the material, it is never an aimless wander.
-- Jake Hodder * Journal of Historical Geography *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Mongrel American Social SciencePart I. The Noble Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development1. Empire by Association2. Race ChildrenPart II. Worlds of Color3. Storm Centers of Political Theory and Practice4. Imperialism and Internationalism in the 1920sPart III. The North versus the Black Atlantic5. Making the World Safe for "Minorities"6. The Philanthropy of MastersPart IV. "The Dark World Goes Free"7. The First but Not Last Crisis of a Cold War Profession8. Hands of Ethiopia9. The Fate of the Howard SchoolConclusion: The High Plane of Dignity and DisciplineNotes
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