In
the first decade of the 20th century, the US South of
sharecropping and segregation became a model for colonial powers seeking to
create similar systems of racial hierarchy and capitalist agriculture in
Africa. This is what W.E.B. Dubois referred to as the creation of a global
“color line”. This lecture will discuss the creation of the colonial and
post-colonial Global South out of the US post-Reconstruction New South by
telling the story of an expedition sent by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee
Institute to the German colony of Togo in West Africa. It will show that the
global color line was also more than just an imposition from above. It was also
a counterrevolutionary response to the self-emancipatory efforts of Africans
and African-Americans in the era of Atlantic slavery.
Andrew Zimmerman received his Ph.D. in history from the
University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Alabama
in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire and the Globalization of the
New South (Princeton University Press) and a number of scholarly articles
in journals such as The European Studies Journal and American
Historical Review. He was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at
Columbia University and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2017. Professor Zimmerman works
at the intersections of transnational history and critical race studies.