What I Am Thinking About Now: Samuel Zipp, “Our Imperialisms at Home: Wendell Willkie on Race and the World at Midcentury”

, Room 103

Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Samuel Zipp, Associate Professor of American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University.

“Our Imperialisms at Home: Wendell Willkie on Race and the World at Midcentury”
Wendell Willkie’s much-watched trip around the world in 1942—he visited Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, the Soviet Union, and China—and the bestselling book that it spawned, One World (1943), were key ingredients of a wartime discourse that asked Americans to embrace new conceptions of geography and planetary social relations. Willkie’s universalism contested European empire—and its racialist underpinnings—as well as domestic racial segregation—what he called “our imperialisms at home”—and yet his vision also encompassed American exceptionalist ideals that underwrote the advent of a new form of particularly American empire.

RSVP: [email protected]. Snacks and caffeine will be provided.

“What I Am Thinking About Now” is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.