This roundtable gathers reflections on Sam Klug’s groundbreaking new book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2024). The Internal Colony argues that conflicting interpretations of global decolonization exacerbated divisions between American liberalism and the Black freedom movement in the middle of the twentieth century. Between the Second World War and the middle of the 1970s, conflicts over how to define colonialism and how to understand its relation to American racial and class inequality pervaded both internal debates within the Black freedom movement and struggles between Black activists and state policymakers. These conflicts first surfaced in foreign policy, as Black activists advocated for anticolonial priorities in debates about the creation of the United Nations and the formation of U.S. international development policy. But ideas formed in relation to what are often considered foreign affairs soon migrated to domestic politics. The question of how colonialism should be defined became a fault line of American political debate in the 1960s. Leading white liberal thinkers and politicians promoted an image of the United States as the first postcolonial state, and antipoverty policymakers sought to apply domestically the lessons of international development policy. At the same time, many Black activists and writers began to envisage the African American population as an internal colony, employing in domestic policy debates a language of colonialism and decolonization drawn from the longer history of Black internationalism. Linking intellectual, political, and social movement history, The Internal Colony illuminates how global decolonization provoked profound changes in Americans’ political language and political behavior. The end of empire transformed the terms of debate over race and class in the twentieth-century United States.

As a book that speaks to scholars of African American history, Black internationalism, Black intellectual history, diplomatic history, anticolonialism, and political theory, Klug’s work has much to offer audiences. This roundtable exemplifies its multidirectional meaning among just such a diverse array of discussants: scholars of African American history, of Black radicalism, of African intellectual history, and of Black political theory. The series of responses assembled here use Klug’s rich book to further unpack some of the central questions and key debates he foregrounds: the clash between anticolonialisms from below and Black diplomacy from above, between domestic and internationalist registers of Black politics, and between radical and liberal inflections of the colonial thesis. Merve Fejzula will consider how Africans contested the ways in which African Americans did (or did not) take up the politics of colonial comparison to unsettle their historic vanguardism. Russell Rickford takes up the mobilization of the colonial thesis in debates among Black expatriates from the Global South in the US Global North. Penny Von Eschen will tackle the lingering questions of how domestic colonialism was mobilized as a way of negotiating new forms of political and cultural authority in a newly postcolonial geopolitical context. Taken together, this roundtable will unpack how The Internal Colony illuminates new questions and directions for scholars of decolonization and Black freedom.