Harvard University Press Blog

Of Color in America

In January, we’ll publish Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. The book examines a hidden history of transnational cooperation towards the freedom of the “colored world.” Below, Slate considers the role of that sort of solidarity within America’s evolving racial composition.

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Fifty years from now, the United States will no longer have a “white” majority. The significance of this demographic change will hinge on what it means to be non-white or, in an oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase, a “person of color.”

Take the case of Nikki Haley, the Indian American governor of South Carolina. In January 2011, Benjamin Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged Haley to stop flying the Confederate flag in front of the state capitol. Jealous appealed to Haley as South Carolina’s “first governor of color,” referenced the history of linkages between the civil rights movement and the Indian freedom struggle, and challenged Haley to consider, “What would Gandhi do?” His historical references might have been different if Jealous had known that Haley, when asked to identify her race on South Carolina’s official voter registration card, had checked the box for “white.”

As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, for much of American history, immigrants from India had to claim legal whiteness if they wished to become citizens. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, naturalization was expanded to those of African descent. All other ethnic groups were relegated to a gray zone in which citizenship rights depended on proof of whiteness.

Between 1908 and 1922, at least sixty-nine Indians gained United States citizenship by successfully claiming to be white. In Savannah, Georgia in 1910, Abba Dolla, a native of Calcutta, arranged for a doctor to testify to his “pure Caucasian blood.” The presiding judge described Dolla as follows: “The applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft.” Uncertain about Dolla’s racial identity, the judge asked him to pull up his shirt sleeves. Fortunately for Dolla, the judge concluded, “The skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly.” Impressed, the judge granted citizenship.

The ability of Indians to gain legal whiteness ended in 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled against granting citizenship to a U.S. Army veteran, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh American like Nikki Haley. After 1923, many Indian Americans came to connect their persecution as a racial minority to the struggles of other non-white Americans. Jagjit (J.J.) Singh, an influential Sikh businessman and the leader of the most prominent Indian American organization in the 1930s and 1940s, established close links with Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP. While Mahatma Gandhi inspired opponents of American racism, African American struggles attracted sympathy throughout India. Many Indians came to see themselves as part of a global struggle for the rights of “colored people.”

When, in 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” he globalized the color line, referring not only to the “millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea” but also to “the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere.” Over the course of the twentieth century, immigration rendered Du Bois’s inclusive conception of color vital to understanding race within as well as beyond the borders of the United States. While the ethnic diversity of the United States has always exceeded the black/white dichotomy, rapid increases in the population of Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and other non-black people of color has made it especially important to understand the long history of relationships between minority groups. That history can help us understand the origin of tensions between ethnic groups. It can also remind us that inter-ethnic relations have been marked by cooperation as well as tension, cooperation inspired for many by a colored cosmopolitanism.

The racial ambiguity that marks the history of South Asian Americans also colors the history of other ethnic groups. For decades, immigrants from throughout the world struggled to prove their whiteness. Americans from as far afield as the Middle East, Mexico, and Japan marshaled notions of Caucasian identity or pointed to the bare fact of white skin. While immigrants no longer need to prove their whiteness in order to become citizens, the racial ambiguity of many immigrant communities complicates their relationships with each other and with an America struggling with persistent racial inequality and ongoing debates concerning the proper role of race in the public sphere. Will Barack Obama win the Latino vote? Should Korean Americans and Cambodian Americans be lumped together as “Asian Americans” for the purposes of affirmative action? Many of the most pressing issues regarding race in contemporary America relate to the vexed question of what it means to be a “person of color,” a question that hinges on how non-white Americans view each other. The history of colored cosmopolitanism offers hope for a solidarity between non-white Americans that is neither anti-white nor blind to racial inequality. It matters how Nikki Haley understands her racial identity. It matters what she thinks when she walks by that Confederate flag.

Liu Xiaobo and the Transformation of China

The first page of our Fall 2011 catalog presents No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The second page features Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, an impressively researched biography of the Chinese leader thought to have had as much impact on the world as any other twentieth century figure. The juxtaposition of these two books—the connection between these two men—is not lost on us. The actions of one can fairly be said to have created the conditions for the emergence of the other.

In December 2009, at the close of the trial for his involvement in the drafting and dissemination of Charter 08, a manifesto for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, Liu Xiaobo read a statement from which the title of this first English language collection is drawn. It began with his declaration that “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life, which now is just over one half century in length.” It was in June 1989 that the world watched the massacre of demonstrators in Beijing at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere, and it was Liu’s involvement in those demonstrations and their violent end that set his life on a new course.

In the decades since, he has frequently written of the legacy of Tiananmen Square, and has also struggled to come to terms with his own role, and that of other leaders who, though forever marked by their participation, still escaped with their lives. The stories of 155 who died were told in a booklet, Witnessing the Massacre and Seeking Justice, produced by a group called the Tiananmen Mothers. In an essay titled “Listed Carefully to the Voices of the Tiananmen Mothers,” included in No Enemies, No Hatred, Liu details the cold violence of the military crackdown, and the shocking murder of many unaffiliated with the demonstrations. He describes his own reaction to the stories:

Guilt feelings stab at my heart like daggers as I read these transcripts, because it is clear that not one of the people whose lives were so cruelly snuffed out that night was among the “elite.” None of the conspicuous activists—like me—were killed. The victims ranged from a 66-year-old senior citizen to a child barely 9. There were people in their thirties and forties, the prime of life, a youngster of 17, another who was 20-something . . . But they were all just ordinary students and civilians, people who apparently wanted to live ordinary lives and to enjoy everyday sorts of happiness, and on that blood-soaked night they had made the mistake of acting on impulses of sympathy or of justice, and it had cost them everything.

He continues:

I am just trying to remind myself, as one of those “influential” figures, of the true facts of the Tiananmen Massacre. How was it that university students and high-level intellectuals led the 1989 movement, but when the dust settled all the people who were massacred, went out to rescue the wounded, or received heavy sentences were common people? Why is it that we scarcely hear the voices of the people who paid the heaviest prices, while the luminaries who survived the massacre can hardly stop talking? . . . To look squarely at the suffering of the ordinary people whose misery is recorded in the transcripts makes me feel that I am not qualified even to be called a “survivor.” It is true that I was one of the last people to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4th, but I did nothing to volunteer myself during the bloody terror of the massacre’s aftermath, nothing to show that a kernel of my humanity had survived.

Deng Xiaoping and China's Rise

“I first visited China in 1979, a few months after our countries normalized relations. China was just beginning to remake its economy, and I was in the first Senate delegation to witness this evolution. Traveling through the country last month, I could see how much China had changed in 32 years — and yet the debate about its remarkable rise remains familiar. Then, as now, there were concerns about what a growing China meant to America and the world.”

That’s Vice President Joe Biden, from an op-ed titled “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise” that ran in yesterday’s New York Times. As Biden notes, 1979 was a turning point for China’s place in the world. The country was opening itself up, working to normalize its relations with other nations and finally bring its industry and economy into the twentieth century. All of the developments that Biden encountered on his recent visit were set in motion by those earlier changes. And no one was more responsible for those changes than Deng Xiaoping, China’s preeminent leader from 1978 through 1992.

In 1979 Ezra F. Vogel published a book, Japan as Number One, that helped prepare westerners for Japan’s surprising 1980s rise. After retiring from teaching in 2000, Vogel wanted to do it again, to write another book that would help Americans understand key developments in Asia at the outset of the twenty-first century. The biggest thing happening in Asia was China, as Vogel realized then and Biden affirms now. And the way to understand China was to understand Deng. So Vogel began the work for what became Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a massive biography of a man who likely had as great an impact on the world’s course as any other twentieth century figure.

Deng led a long, complicated life that included time in France and the Soviet Union as a young man, years as a military leader and Communist Party official, and a long, fraught relationship with Mao Zedong, who twice purged Deng but never destroyed him. Vogel describes Deng as a pragmatic politician who led China’s embrace of technological innovation and worked to overcome the damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but who also approved the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He wasn’t usually the source of the ideas that were transforming China, but he was the only person equipped to implement them. 

We spoke with Ezra Vogel about Deng and the challenges he faced: 

 

Announcing the Murty Classical Library of India Design Contest

In 2013 we’ll be releasing the first books of The Murty Classical Library of India, a new series intended to present the literary cultures of India to a global readership in an unprecedented manner. The Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI), established in 2010 through an endowment gift from Rohan Narayana Murty and the Murty family of Bangalore, India, will provide new English-language translations of works written in Bangla, Hindi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and other Indic languages, with the original text on the facing page.

A new series needs a new look, and the MCLI presents unique design challenges. We need to get it right. So, today we’re very excited to invite submissions of designs for the Murty Classical Library of India. Harvard University Press Executive Editor-at-Large Sharmila Sen noted, “Because the Murty family founded the MCLI in order to bring the rich literary heritage of India to the entire world, it is especially fitting that we issue an open invitation to generate a design for this landmark series.”

The designer of the winning series logo, logotype, and jacket design will receive 10,000 USD and jacket credit on all books in the series. Designs may be submitted between September 1 and December 1, 2011. Residents of, and design firms based in, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and India are eligible to enter. Design specifications and contest rules are posted here.

On its establishment last year, Harvard Professor of Economics and Philosophy Amartya Sen expressed his appreciation for the MCLI. “There are few intellectual gaps in the world that are as glaring as the abysmal ignorance of Indian classics in the Western world. It is wonderful that the Murty Classical Library of India is taking up the challenge of filling this gap, through a new commitment of the Harvard University Press, backed by the discerning enthusiasm of the Murty family, and the excellent leadership of Sheldon Pollock — an outstanding Sanskritist and classical scholar. This will be a big contribution to advancing global understanding that is so much needed in the world today.”

We’re accepting design submissions through December 1st. All details are available via the MCLI website, www.murtylibrary.com

Please help us spread the word.

Nonviolence Without Borders

Protesters throughout this Arab Spring have been inspired by the legacy of the American civil rights movement. Nico Slate, author of the forthcoming Colored Cosmopolitanism, explains below how this transnational affinity echoes that of an earlier era, a hidden history of bonds of sympathy and solidarity forged between African Americans and Indians during their freedom struggles of the late nineteenth century through the 1960s.

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A 50-year-old comic book about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach to nonviolent resistance has been translated into Arabic and has been circulating amongst protesters in Egypt and throughout the Middle East for months. According to a recent article by CNN, the cartoon is only one manifestation of a broad interest in the civil rights movement amongst today’s nonviolent activists. The comic book in question, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, itself documents an older link between the civil rights movement and freedom struggles throughout the world. The comic book, which can be found here, traces King’s leadership back to the nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in India.

As I detail in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Gandhi and King. The comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. FOR helped organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial organization that launched sit-ins modeled on Gandhian protest in the early 1940s and later pioneered the freedom rides. Many civil rights activists—some now famous and others largely forgotten—turned to Gandhi for inspiration and ideas.

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, two young Black women were arrested on a bus near Petersburg, Virginia. Like Parks, both women were already actively engaged in the struggle for racial equality. By the time they boarded an old bus bound for Durham, North Carolina in late March 1940, Pauli Murray and Adelene McBean had long discussed how they could most effectively challenge racial segregation. The poor condition of their bus gave them the opportunity to translate their thoughts into action. Seated near the back of the bus, directly over a wheel, the two young women suffered with every bump. When McBean began to feel a sharp pain in her side, she and Murray occupied seats in the middle of the bus. The driver told them to move back. They refused and, after a lengthy debate with the driver and local police officers, were arrested. Murray wrote friends soon after her arrest, “We did not plan our arrest intentionally. The situation developed and, having developed, we applied what we knew of Satyagraha on the spot.”

Gandhi used the word satyagraha, combining the Sanskrit for “truth” and “holding firm,” to refer to his particular approach to nonviolent civil disobedience. In her memoirs, Murray remembered that when she and McBean were arrested their knowledge of satyagraha was “sketchy” and they had “no experience in the Gandhian method.” Like Murray, many Americans would learn the “Gandhian method” in the process of applying it against racial injustice. Less a rigid system than a series of guiding principles and a source of inspiration, Gandhian satyagraha would be reinvented in restaurants, department stores, buses and jails throughout the United States.

Connections between South Asians and African Americans extended beyond nonviolence, as Manning Marable’s new book on Malcolm X makes clear. Marable’s work demonstrates the breadth of linkages between African American Muslims and global Islam. Colored Cosmopolitanism reveals that such linkages were part of a larger constellation of connections in which nonviolent activists, Black and South Asian Muslims, Hindu reformers, Christian missionaries, followers of Marcus Garvey, African American soldiers, Indian immigrants, labor organizers, and many others forged links across freedom struggles. What provided coherence to these multifaceted linkages? I argue that a transnational conception of color came to serve as a bridge between people struggling against racism throughout the world. African Americans and South Asians together imagined a colored cosmopolitanism, a “dark” or “colored” world united in the struggle against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression. Advocates of colored cosmopolitanism fought for the freedom of the “colored world” even while calling into question the meanings of both color and freedom.

On Tagore, As A Way Of Not Letting Go

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of India’s Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate, we have just published The Essential Tagore, the largest single volume of his work available in English. Tagore was as prolific and diverse a writer as the world has known, and this volume presents selections of his work across many genres, with new translations by Tagore scholars and others, including Amitav Ghosh and Amit Chaudhuri. Below, HUP’s Sharmila Sen reflects on Tagore, and on “separation” as a foundational aspect of the modern Indian self.

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When my parents and I first came to the United States we could only bring five suitcases with us. In the one suitcase allotted to me, I chose to bring the following: some dresses, my collection of miniature plastic animals, a red View-Master that my father had bought for me during a work trip to Bombay, an old atlas, and a few books in Bangla, my native language. Those are the only things I brought from my Indian childhood to my American life. Everything else was either sold or given away.

One of those Bangla books sits on my desk as I write this. It is a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of poems titled Shishu (literally, Child). The book, a paperback issued by Viswa Bharati University Press, is lovingly covered with brown paper. On the half-title page I see that the original owner’s name has been carefully erased, probably scraped with a razor blade, from the top right hand corner. At the bottom of the yellowed page is a dedication. Dated exactly two days before I left India for the first time, and addressing me by a name that few people recall these days, it says (I will transliterate here first):

Bidheshe giye amader edesher kobiguruke majhe majhe ei boita pore shoron korish.

The young girl who signed her name underneath these words used a name for herself she rarely uses these days. I have read this line numerous times over the years and still admire the penmanship, its elegance and self-assurance. I am struck by the maturity of the language, which came so easily from the pen of a young girl called Sujata. She and I, a few weeks apart in age, grew up together in Calcutta during the 1970s. In the West, we would be called cousins. But in India, we do not use that word. She is simply my sister. We cannot remember a time when we did not know each other.

When I left India, this was her parting gift to me. For precocious girls who grew up in a bookish family, a volume of poetry is an obvious gift. But Tagore is also a classic gift—almost a clichéd one—that any middle class Bengali girl would give. Indeed, the power of that gift lay not in its singularity, but in its ubiquity. This was my sister’s way of saying goodbye and asking me never to forget our shared language.

Decades later, Jill Breitbarth’s design makes this old Bangla book reappear on the jacket of The Essential Tagore, a ground-breaking new anthology edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty. As I look at Jill’s elegant design, I am reminded of another poem, one not included in Shishu. This poem is called “Jete Nahi Dibo” (“I Won’t Let You Go”) and it appears in a collection called Sonar Tari (literally, The Golden Boat). Here is an excerpt from Fakrul Alam’s crisp translation of the poem:

Someone trying to snatch from darkness

The flame of a dying lamp exclaims

A hundred times, “I won’t let you go!”

It’s the oldest cry resounding from earth to heaven

The solemnest lament, “I won’t let you go!”

And yet, alas, we have to let go; and yet,

Of course, we must go. And this is how it has been,

From time immemorial. Since creation’s currents

Began streaming relentlessly towards extinction’s sea

With burning eyes and outstretched arms

We’ve all been crying out in vain endlessly,

“Won’t let go, won’t let you go!”

Filling earth’s shores with laments

As everything ebbs inexorably away.

The waves up front cry out to the ones in the rear,

“Won’t let go, won’t let you go!”— But no one listens. . . .

On Liu Xiaobo

Last Friday came word of the Nobel Peace Prize for Chinese political dissident and literary critic Liu Xiaobo, for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The world knew about the honor before the man himself. Currently imprisoned in northeastern China on an 11-year sentence, Liu learned of the prize only days later, after being granted a rare visit from his wife, the poet Liu Xia. Now comes news that Liu Xia herself has been placed under house arrest in Beijing. China reacted immediately to the news from Oslo, denouncing the award as blasphemy. Russia, too, is dismissing the prize as a “political tool of the west.”

Liu has been prominent since his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His current detention stems from his part in the drafting and dissemination of Charter 08, a petition that called on China’s ruling Communist Party to usher in political reform. As detailed by Geremie R. Barmé, who researches Chinese culture and intellectual history, the petition was signed by leading public intellectuals and concerned citizens, gaining momentum until authorities intervened:

On Christmas Day 2009, as a momentous year of anniversaries drew to an end, the Beijing authorities announced that Liu Xiaobo had been sentenced to eleven years in jail for 'inciting subversion.’ According to media reports, this was the longest term given to any offender accused of this particularly nebulous crime since it was introduced in 1997. Ironically, for the two decades since the tragic denouement of the 1989 mass protest movement that pressed for media freedoms and basic rights Liu’s has been a voice of reason and decency. Like patriots who had agitated for the party to make China a modern and civil nation in the 1940s, activists like Liu, and the thousands who signed the Charter 08, have used peaceful means and public protest to appeal to Chinese authorities to respect their own constitution. (Barmé's full article is here.)

An essay written by Barmé in 1990 that presented Liu Xiaobo as a figure through which to understand the extraordinary energy and enthusiasm of the Protest Movement of 1989 was recently made available online by China Heritage Quarterly. In the essay, Barmé describes Liu's decision not to flee Beijing as echoing "the tragedy of individualistic and heroic Chinese intellectuals of the last century" who "travel a course from self-liberation to self-immolation."

At his recent trial, Liu gave a statement expressing the hope that he will be “the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition.” As translated by Professor David Kelly of the China Research Centre, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Liu continued:

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth. I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints.  (The Guardian has the full text in english, here.)

We offer our congratulations to Liu Xiaobo on the great honor of this recognition from the Nobel committee. For some months now we have had a contract to publish a selection of Liu Xiaobo's writing, and we now hope to speed the process so as to have this book out by next fall, so that readers of English can judge for themselves the importance of his work. It is neither standard practice to announce a project this far before its publication, nor particularly graceful to advertise it on the heels of such a politically charged event. In this instance, though, and in the face of what appears to be increased persecution of Liu and his family, it does seem appropriate to share the news that we’ll soon do our part to help make Liu’s writing available.

 

'09 a “very bloody” year, predict Taliban fighters

This as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban agree to join forces in the face of the upcoming American troop increase, reports Carlotta Gall in today's New York Times.

As it happens, we're releasing a new paperback edition of Crews and Tarzi's The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, a collection of essays in which leading scholars explore the ins and outs of the Taliban in an attempt to show how the movement, far from representing pure anachronism, in fact constitutes a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Essential reading for those who wish to understand the region beyond the necessarily here-and-now picture established by even the best current affairs reporting.

||| The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan

Disappointment city

Population: Chinese national soccer team.

Or so it would seem from a New York Times article that appears today, upon the team's exit from the Olympic tournament with an 0-3 record.

The jokes have already begun to circulate among Chinese soccer fans bemoaning another underwhelming performance from the men's national team: "The Chinese team just won two red medals" (referring to the two red cards received for unsportsmanlike play); "Our soccer team won the gold medal in martial arts"; and "China has had a weird year, with a freak snowstorm, the Tibetan riots and an earthquake, but the performance of our soccer team shows that some things never change" (funnier, we're guessing, when delivered in the original language).

The article quotes Xu Guoqi, author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, explaining how corrupt management has hobbled the team's efforts to rise to the top tier. Xu wrote an op-ed last month in the Washington Post on the state of Chinese soccer, comparing its long-suffering fans to those of the Chicago Cubs (ouch). Professor Xu is the authority on the intimate ties between athletic achievement and Chinese national self-image, and his thoughts on the soccer team are illuminating for those not familiar with the backstory. Xu also shared his thoughts on the Olympics more generally on an episode of NPR's "Only a Game" that aired last Saturday--listen here.

Still there, even if you can't see him

The character chai ("demolish"), now often found on the side of older Beijing buildings. Detail of a collage by Wang Jinsong.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, noted China scholar Geremie Barmé detects the hand of Chairman Mao in the Olympic opening ceremonies, even if us Westerners can't see him through the smog and the (digitally enhanced) fireworks. Avoiding the temptation, all too common in today's journalism, to view modern China as somehow sui generis, scholars like Barmé, author of a book on the Forbidden City, and Michael Dutton, author of Beijing Time, remind us of the continuity that exists even in a city that seems to have demolished and rebuilt itself before our very eyes. Watching the fireworks explode over the old north-south imperial axis, designed, as Dutton notes, to maintain the balance of qi in the city, it's hard not to marvel at how seamlessly the old insinuates itself into what appears to be wholly, terrifyingly new.