Session Abstract

The AHA’s 2013 annual meeting theme of “Lives, Places, Stories” offers an intriguing lens through which to view the First Universal Races Congress of 1911 (URC).  The URC was an extraordinary gathering of statesmen, scientists, ethical reformers, and anticolonial activists held in London for four days in the summer of 1911.  It marked an important moment in the lives of people like Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who brought a NAACP delegation to the meeting and subsequently wrote about his experiences there.  The participants came from Europe, the U.S., China, Japan, the Netherlands East Indies, India and Ceylon, Iran, Egypt, the Ottoman and Russian empires, West Africa, South Africa, Brazil, Haiti, and elsewhere.  Thus the URC was both an event that took place in London and a network that connected people from many places around the world.  Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, published on the eve of the URC, and Record of the Proceedings offer tantalizing evidence of the stories and ideas exchanged between participants about the color bar, the “awakening of the East,” and the clash of empires.  Indeed, the URC revealed many of the currents and crosscurrents of the era, from notions of civilizational parity and ideals of cosmopolitan peace and progress to assertions of human equality by colonial subjects and people of color.  Planning for a second meeting, contemplated for Honolulu or Paris in 1915, was only abandoned at the outbreak of the First World War.

Our proposed roundtable will address some of the interconnected lives, far-flung places, and critical stories that make the URC so compelling yet so difficult to encompass.  Indeed, the five participants are members of a larger group of scholars contributing to an essay collection on the URC.  Ian Christopher Fletcher will give background on the URC and suggest some contexts and comparisons for understanding its significance in the world before the First World War.  Masako Racel will examine the ideas of the Japanese delegates to the URC, highlighting their arguments about Japanese civilization as a “new world-civilization.”  Michele Reid-Vazquez will explore the multiple connections between the URC and the colonies and republics of the Caribbean, where diverse communities contested issues of race and citizenship.  Pamela Scully will analyze how participants in the URC invoked and employed discourses of masculinity to help constitute themselves as international citizens.  Finally, Pamela J. Dorn Sezgin will consider the ideas of the URC participant Dr. Riza Tefvik as a way to assess Young Turk conceptions of race, nation, and modernity in the Ottoman empire.

The goal of our presentations is to generate a wide-ranging discussion of the URC.  The roundtable represents an opportunity for us to benefit from the insights of members of the audience.  We anticipate that many of these colleagues, from a variety of areas of specialization in modern history, will bring considerable knowledge and theoretical sophistication to the conversation.  We want to take back the roundtable’s collective “brainstorms” to our fellow contributors in hopes of enhancing the essay collection.