1 - Black Is a Country, n’est-ce pas? Race, Rights and Nation in the Wilsonian Moment

Summary

This chapter explores the ways that key black intellectuals from the United States and the French imperial nation-state sought to configure the relationships between racial and national belonging and political access to citizenship rights in the immediate aftermath of World War I. While being black meant something different in the respective contexts of the US and France, a shared sense of exclusion on the basis of race brought these thinkers together. More often than not, they also agreed with the United States' President Wilson's vision of the right to self-determination as the province of civilized men, and their activism during this period was motived by a desire to demonstrate that ethnicity was neither a marker of civilizational capacity nor of nationality. Such consensus did not automatically translate to transnational activism nor to international black solidarity.