P-CON Lecture: Robert Vitalis - "The Hidden History of Race in American International Relations"

"The Hidden History of Race in American International Relations"

Delivered on 13 October 2008 at Colgate University. Sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies.

In this presentation, Professor Vitalis examines the origins of the study of international relations in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that until we loosen the hold a particular idea has over our contemporary imaginations—that the subject matter of international relations is found on one side of a line between the "domestic" and the "foreign"—it will not be possible to appreciate the full significance of the fact that the scholars who wrote the first articles, papers, treatises, and textbooks in international relations all saw the "Negro problem" in the South as something to be included within the new interdisciplinary field of study. Political scientists theorizing about what they called "race development" (the title of the first journal of IR in fact) imagined two fundamentally different logics and processes at work, and thus different rules that were to be applied, across the boundary dividing Anglo-Saxons or Teutons and the inferior races found in Indian Territory, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Here was political science's original and signal contribution to the theory and practice of hierarchy, a theory that W. E. B. Du Bois and the handful of black political scientists who followed him challenged in his continuing arguments about the global color line.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Vitalis
• International Race Relations
• IR
• P-CON
• Peace and Conflict Studies
• Colgate University