Sarah C. Dunstan constructs a narrative of black struggles for rights and citizenship that spans most of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of people and movements from France and the United States, the French Caribbean and African colonies. She explores how black scholars and activists grappled with the connections between culture, race and citizenship and access to rights, mapping African American and Francophone black intellectual collaborations from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the March on Washington in 1963. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, Dunstan situates key black intellectuals in a transnational framework. She reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals simultaneously constituted and reconfigured notions of Western civilization.
Methodologies of textual and linguistic analysis have long held sway in Anglo‐American practices of intellectual history. Such approaches tend to decouple the ideas being traced from the human subject, or scholar, producing the thought. Taking the lead from the rich theorising work done in feminist, gender, race and cultural histories, this article asks what changes in our understanding of intellectual histories of international thought when we connect the lived and bodily realities of the human subjects producing the ideas to the ideas themselves. In so doing, the article makes a case for the importance of fleshing out what the author calls ‘scholarly habitus’ and suggests the potential utility of oral history as a methodology for reconstructing ‘scholarly habitus’. The article will draw upon an oral history archive comprised of twenty interviews conducted with senior women International Relations scholars from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to flesh out this argument. The article argues that oral history, as a medium for autobiographical practice, can reveal aspects of how gender, race and class shaped the scholarly practice and career trajectories of these women, as well as shed light on the historical dynamics of the discipline of International Relations as a whole.
The French-Congolese Senator, Jane Vialle, was appointed as a French delegate to the United Nations in 1949. During her term she served on the Ad-Hoc Anti-Slavery committee as an expert on African colonial conditions and the status of African Women. Vialle's work on the international stage was an extension of her efforts towards reforming the political, social and economic rights of women at national and local levels, within the French Fourth Republic and the Oubangui-Chari region she represented in French West Africa. Despite her efforts, Vialle was frustrated with the glacial pace of reform in all three arenas, declaring to her friend and colleague, the African American historian and Pan-Africanist Rayford W. Logan, that she often felt she was being used as ‘une nègre de drame’. Logan believed the expression was the French equivalent of the American phrase ‘a showpiece or token negro’. Through the framework of Jane Vialle’s political career, this articles explores how the notion of representation and what it meant to be ‘une nègre de drame’ or, indeed, to be an authentic representative of one’s nation, race or gender intersected with Vialle’s reformist efforts in Oubangui-Chari, the French Fourth Republic and on the international stage.
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