Placing and Displacing the First Universal Races Congress of 1911

My paper will provide a brief introduction to the URC and the roundtable.  I will place the URC by tracing its origins, describing its organization, and locating its context as an historic event in the metropolis of London in the summer of 1911.  I will then suggest some of the ways we may want to displace the URC by indicating wider global processes that shaped its agenda, various absences and silences that revealed its uneven scope, and other sites of encounter that offered contrasting perspectives on race, civilization, and empire.