"But a Local Phase of a World
Problem": Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950

Robin D. G. Kelley

The web of Afro-American history radiates beyond the United States borders. It exists within the core of two intersecting circles, one this country and the other the African world.

Robert L. Harris, "Coming of Age," 1982

One cannot see behind one's back, the earth is behind it.

Ewe Proverb

As a scholar who owes his formative intellectual training to ethnic studies programs and Third World solidarity movements, I am intrigued by recent discussions of how "globalization" has pushed United States scholars to think beyond the nation-state, develop "transnational" and international approaches, and reconsider "diaspora" as an analytical framework.1 Black studies, Chicano/a studies, and Asian American studies were diasporic from their inception, a direct outgrowth of the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s that gave birth to those programs. Whether they are speaking of borderlands, migrations, or diasporas, ethnic studies scholars examine the hyphen between places of "origin" and America. My particular intellectual mooring, however, was the black studies department at California State University at Long Beach. Our courses always cut across disciplinary and national boundaries, exploring various aspects of the "black world" from ancient times to the present—a world that encompassed Africa, Europe, and the Americas and wherever else this sprawling African diaspora left its mark. One of the first books assigned to us in those days was Chancellor Williams's remarkable and enigmatic The Destruction of Black Civilization, a single volume sixteen years in the making. The kind of training he felt he required to complete such a work left us in awe and revealed something of the kind of global vision that informed black studies: "Believing that the history of the race could not be understood if studied in isolation, I began a slow and deliberately unrushed review of European history, ancient and modern, and the history of Arabs and Islamic people. I say 'review' because by 1950 I had already studied and taught in the three fields of American, European and Arabic history—a most fortunate circumstance for the task ahead."2 Ironically, because black studies' original conception treated Africans and African descendants across the globe as one people (diverse and complex, of course), works by scholars such as Williams and the field more generally have often been criticized—with some justification, I might add—for essentialism or trading in fictions.3 At the same time, however, it is precisely this perspective of seeing black people in global terms that forced the field to be relentlessly international and comparative.

1

Yet even the world brought to me by my black studies professors was not so startlingly new. The particular Pan-African framework through which we viewed the black world was all too familiar before I set foot in a college classroom. Growing up in Harlem during the mid- to late 1960s, even as kids the international dimensions of our lives were so profound that they were practically taken for granted. We were part of an African diaspora before we were Americans; we were told by resident radicals that we had more in common with the Chinese than with the white folks downtown or along Riverside Drive. We were surrounded by Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Barbadians, Haitians, ad infinitum, and they defended their home connections with a vengeance. We even drank a short-lived soda pop called Afro-Cola and were surrounded by people walking the streets in dashikis, Nehru suits, and Chinese peasant outfits. So the idea of a bounded national history set in isolation from the world contradicted my own lived experience, let alone what we as young, aspiring "Afrikans" learned in college.

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