Join us for a discussion with Vaughn Rasberry, author of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016). Vaughn Rasberry is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. He works on African American and African Diaspora literature, 20th-century U.S. fiction, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. Justin Desmangles, the director of the Before Columbus Foundation and host of the radio broadcast New Day Jazz, will moderate the discussion.
Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association, and the American Book Award, from the Before Columbus Foundation, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination, shows how a group of black writers challenged Cold War liberalism’s conceit that it stood in stark opposition to totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism). Writers such as Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, and John A. Williams, committed to global decolonization and black freedom, pointed to liberal democracies’ legacy of repression and injustice. As a result, they developed a perspective that reimagined the anti-fascist, anti-communist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the U.S. as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence.
This event is sponsored by Gary B. Nash Chair Funds, Department of African American Studies, Department of English & the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
