Blood Brothers: Moral Emotion, the Afro-Asian-Canadian Bloc, and South Africa’s Expulsion from the Commonwealth, 1960–1

During the 1961 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting, Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, joined with his non-white partners to form an ‘Afro-Asian-Canadian bloc’ that, for all intents and purposes, expelled South Africa from the association. Drawing on American, Australian, British, Canadian, and South African documents, this article argues that Diefenbaker did so in a bid to preserve the Commonwealth to bridge global racial divides and avert a potential “race war” in the making. The Commonwealth could thus retain its integrity as an institution responsive to global South concerns and chaperon them during a transitional phase to statehood. In so doing, newly independent peoples would be rendered culturally familiar and predictable, embedding them within the liberal international order. Consequently, this study offers insight into Canadian attitudes towards African decolonization and what the Commonwealth meant to Canada beyond its strategic imperative. By examining Ottawa’s approach to apartheid from 1960 to 1961 through the intersection of race and “moral emotion,” it advances a fresh approach to conceptualizing Canadian international history.

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

Breathe into Believing

This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know” (Bridgforth 2012). One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas. Canfield, Arkansas, 1896 We're children Babies really when the fires start A mob is always ready to take our wages Run us away Always ready to lynch us When a volley of shots be my lullabies I won't live to see 36 I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions.

Brothers in Arms?

Chapter 9 looks at what happened to the US military’s white-nonwhite lines as American troops moved overseas during World War II. Nonblack minorities faced both bright and blurry white-nonwhite lines when deployed abroad. At times, the military remained determined to uphold distinctions between whites, on the one hand, and Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, on the other. This determination, evident in everything from military justice proceedings to promotion patterns, stemmed primarily from long-standing civilian investments in these distinctions and in response to the vicious race war in the Pacific with Japan. At the same time, overseas service also witnessed the continued blurring of white-nonwhite lines—the transformation of “Mexicans,” “Puerto Ricans,” “Indians,” “Filipinos,” “Chinese,” and even “Japanese” into whites’ buddies and brothers, comrades and fellow Americans, deepening a process that had begun on the home front. While this overseas blurring often emanated from day-to-day battlefield bonding, it was America’s military leaders and commanders who largely made it possible. In doing so, they narrowed the white-nonwhite divide, but also deepened the black-white one in the process.

Global Race War

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.

Nazi Grand Strategy, Genocide, and Dismantlement of the State System, 1941–1945

This chapter examines the fusion between a geopolitical imaginary rooted in the state system and Nazi Germany’s specific racialized “imperial” imaginary. Here the idea of race war is at its very center. The key historical moment is during the summer and fall of 1941, when the annihilation of the Jews becomes completely conflated with Germany’s long-term strategic goals. A race war, as conceived by Nazi Germany, was the logical consequence of a social imaginary that joined race, biology, and nature and that transcended politically defined boundaries. There was no prioritization of the geopolitical nation-state over the racial enemy, between geopolitical blocs versus the Jewish “internal” racialized enemy or the external “Asiatic hordes.”

Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, and Global Racial Order

The premise of this chapter is the elucidation of a different ontology of global politics and order of the nineteenth century. International relations theory takes for granted a largely ahistorical state-centric ontology, which reifies a specific Eurocentric state and state system as the embodiment of global politics. Instead this chapter focuses on an alternative ontology of race, racial hierarchy, and racial difference as significant for defining the content of an imperial global politics and order. The chapter places into context the emergence of scientific racism and social Darwinism as key intellectual elements in defining a political imaginary that influenced the politics of difference and violence. The chapter shows that this intellectual history reveals a global order that was fundamentally racialized and that global violence was understood and practiced as race war.

Civilizational Conflict as Race War

This chapter focuses on the development of the notion of the “clash of civilizations” as the reformulation of a racialized discourse of international politics and its political salience during the so-called global war on terror. Huntington’s work provides, in a sense, a revitalization and reformulation of the global racial imaginary and its capacity to actualize enmity and violence. Specifically, the chapter examines the processes of racialization of Islam and a new form of enmity, which takes on increasingly important political effects during the 1990s and after September 11, 2001, global politics. The chapter concludes by situating the wider American global war on terror within this frame of civilization versus barbarism.