UC San Diego

This dissertation makes two interconnected arguments. First, I trace a historical pattern of transnational, trans-imperial, anti-racist and anticolonial educational cooperation and solidarity between Asian Indian and African American thinkers and organizations during the first half of the twentieth century. Secondly, I show how the U.S. State Department during the 1950s used various forms of international education as a means of displacing the transnational relationships between African American and Asian Indian communities, and supplanting them with a state-to-state relationship between India and the United States, with the goal of bringing a newly independent India into Cold War alignment. Together, the dissertation’s chapters reveal education as centrally located within the nexus of transnationally-linked decolonization movements, the long Cold War, and the global politics of race, particularly between around 1915 and 1965. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival research with close textual analysis, biographical tracings, and juxtaposition of literary and historical documents, I show how education took center stage over these five tumultuous decades – an eventful half-century during which antiracist and anticolonial activists joined hands across national and imperial borders, and a rising U.S. empire-state both clashed and compromised with decolonization movements abroad and antiracist human rights movements at home.