Penny M. Von Eschen
Paul Robeson and the Anti-Imperialist Imagination
Focusing on Robeson’s relationships with South Asian and African activists including the Assamese musician Bhupen Hazarika, the paper will discuss Robeson’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics from the 1930s through the Cold War and the expansion of U.S. imperial projects in the wake of World War II. The global appeal of Robeson’s anti-imperialist vision proved profoundly threatening to the U.S. State, with multiple government agencies going to extraordinary lengths to silence him. I will examine important remembrances of Robeson’s legacy, including that of the late African American poet, Jayne Cortez, while also noting that contemporary writers continue to distort Robeson’s legacy by consciously or unconsciously invoking anti-communism, and/or evading the capaciousness of his universalist commitments.
Penny M. Von Eschen is Professor of History and William R Kenan, Jr Professor in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She works at the intersections of African American history, cultural history, the global cold war, and the study of the United States in global and transnational dimensions, with monographs such as Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004), Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (1997), and Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989 (2022). She has written on Duke Ellington in Bagdhad (2007), and co-curated “Jam Sessions: American’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” a photography exhibition on the jazz ambassador tours, with Meridian International Center, Washington D.C. She is currently working on a book exploring crises of authority in anti-colonial counter-publics in the years following the Second World War.