Abstract
Cedric Dover met Mr. Baker on a farm outside of Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1937. Dover remembered Baker as “a very grand old gentleman” who had survived slavery to become “a symbol of the wise, courageous and creative ancestry of the Negro people of America.” Dover was introduced to Baker by two renowned African American artists: the painter Aaron Douglas and the conductor William Levi Dawson. But it was Baker, a farmer and former slave, who Dover made central to his memories of that day. Upon learning that Dover was from India, Baker told him, “Now I can see us niggers is getting together at last.” By appropriating the word “nigger,” an epithet used worldwide to disparage people on the basis of skin color, Baker celebrated the solidarity of the global struggle against racism. Dover dedicated his life to building that solidarity. In Baker, he found more than an icon of Black wisdom. He found proof that oppressed people of color could unite across the borders of race and nation.2
We must be both “racial” and anti-racial at the same time, which really means that nationalism and internationalism must be combined in the same philosophy.
—Cedric Dover, “Notes on Coloured Writing”1
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Notes
Cedric Dover, “Notes on Coloured Writing,” Phylon 8, no. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1947): 222.
Cedric Dover, American Negro Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1960), 7 and 11.
On the history of the word “nigger,” see Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
The range of his ambitions and of his intellectual network make it even more striking that Dover has been largely forgotten. The most comprehensive account of Dover’s life consists of a chapter in Patrick Wright’s Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 242–268.
There are brief mentions of Dover in Michael Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, Isabel Barzun, trans. (New York: Morrow, 1973);
Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 364;
Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 151;
Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11–12;
Gloria Jean Moore, The Anglo-Indian Vision (Melbourne: AE Press, 1986), 64 and 96–97;
Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 72 and 99;
Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 28;
and Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002), 289.
Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: Race and the Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006) and The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World” (1900) in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 625, and The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 13.
Michael Banton, “The Colour Line and the Colour Scale in the Twentieth Century,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 7 (July 2012): 1109–1131;
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race (New York: H. Holt, 1993) and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: H. Holt, 2000);
Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006);
Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Robin D. G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S. History,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1994): 16–32; Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Tony Martin, Race Rirst: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976);
Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998);
Colin Grant, Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Lara Putnam, Rights of Passage: Migrants, States, and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age Greater Caribbean (forthcoming); Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Paulina L. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011);
Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Livio Sansone, Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991);
Padraig O’Malley, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa (New York: Viking, 2007);
Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man, Colour, Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996);
Surendra Bhana and Joy B. Brain, Setting Down Roots: Indian Migrants in South Africa, 1860–1911 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1990);
Aisha Khan, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity Among South Asians in Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);
Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Clash of Colour,” in The Aryan Path 7, no. 3 (March 1936): 111–115, and “Indians and Negroes,” in “A Forum of Fact and Opinion,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 11, 1936, 2;
Marcus Garvey, “The Negro’s Greatest Enemy,” Current History 18, no. 6 (September 1923): 951–957
and reprinted in Amy Jacques Garvey, ed., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, II (New York: Universal Publishing House, 1923), 128.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928);
Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2002);
Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
Nico Slate, “‘I Am a Coloured Woman’: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in the United States, 1939–41,” Contemporary South Asia 17, no. 1 (March 2009): 7–19;
Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds., Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009);
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Cedric Dover, Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers (Bombay: Padma Publications, 1947), 32;
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994);
Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003);
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Justin Hart, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy During World War II,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (February 2004): 49–84.
Lisa Lowe, “Heterogenaity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 39;
Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds., The Spivak Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 214;
Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 20, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 24–50.
On the history of Black Studies, see Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012);
Martha Biondi, “Controversial Blackness: The Historical Development & Future Trajectory of African American Studies,” Daedalus 140, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 226–237;
Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
For an outstanding account of three black intellectuals, see Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919– 1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Also see Cedric Dover, “The Terminology of Homotypes of Insects,” Science 60, no. 1565 (December 1924); “The Classification of Man,” Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Science Section A, Volume 8 (August 1952): 209–213; “The Black Knight,” Phylon 15, no. 1 (1st Quarter, 1954); and “The Black Knight: Part II,” Phylon 15, no. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1954); Brown Phoenix (London: College Press, 1950).
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Slate, N. (2014). Introduction. In: The Prism of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484116_1
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