This week’s episode of HFTF features an interview with Nico Slate, an assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the brand new book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. His work explores how African-Americans and Indians made connections between their freedom struggles during the early twentieth century. Slate’s study provides a careful look not only at the shared world of these movements, but also at the shared world to which they responded: one defined by imperialism, racism, and economic inequality. On the show he describes these transnational connections, some resonances with the present, and concludes by discussing this quote from Frederick Douglass (which I cannot help but include here):
“Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture makers–this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”
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