Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory: Globalism, Localism, and the Question of Race

W. E. B. Du Bois's famous assertion in The Souls of Black Folk, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," has been taken up as a rallying point by activists and critics concerned with the sociopolitical and cultural effects of black racial oppression in the United States. A century later, in the midst of intense affirmative action backlash and in a post-Rodney King world, we can say that the problem of the twenty-first century is still the problem of the color line, Colin Powell notwithstanding. The complete sentence from which Du Bois's proverbial line is quoted is less well known. In its entirety it reads: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" (54). Du Bois saw a continuity in the problems of racial oppression in the United States and the rest of the colonized world. Recognizing the strategic transnational discursive construction of the African-American in Du Bois, or much earlier in David Walker, means participating in a critical reconfiguration of African-American studies and in a broader trend in cultural studies—the move from the local to the global/transnational.