Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1480.

Adviser: Matthew Frye Jacobson.

Beyond Nation explores the formation and evolution of the anti-imperialist, tricontinental discourse articulated by U.S. activists of color between the 1930s and 1970s. It reveals the history of transnational and transcolonial dialogues, solidanities, and identifications that has corresponded with the forced dispersal of racialized peoples through the transatlantic slave trade and through capitalist, imperialist expansion. These radicals rejected an antiracist discourse framed solely around black and U.S. nationhood and the rights of citizenship. Radicals such as Grace Lee, Shirley Graham, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the Black Panther Party, among others, formed alliances across national and racial boundaries, driven by a shared identity of exploitation rather than of biology, origin, or culture. Many of these U.S. activist-intellectuals not only identified with, but as Third World peoples. Refraining the struggle against racism in the U.S. within the context of Latin American, Asian, and African decolonization movements, they asserted the humanity and self-determination of the world's oppressed peoples and created a language of solidarity beyond race.

Although many of these figures did not refer to the framework under which they operated as tricontinentalist, "Beyond Nation" contends that these radicals' ideology and activism on behalf of anti-imperialist movements abroad represents a unique and under-examined political culture whose critiques of global racial capitalism reframed the narratives of race and racial difference and produced powerful identities and alliances. An understanding of the transnational dimension of their identities and politics also provides insight into the ways activist-intellectuals shifted, but maintained, their discourse to adjust to the restrictions imposed by Cold War Imperatives. I discuss this tricontinental discourse largely through the writings of the activist-intellectuals themselves in order to demonstrate how these various individuals and organizations attempted to create an alternative antiracist language, world-view, and ontology as well as the ways in which these radicals imagined and articulated the relationship between racism and empire, between racial and economic exploitation, and between oppression at home and abroad.