Black Internationalism in the Age of Emancipation

Abstract: This introductory essay offers a historical and historiographical framework for this special issue. Assessing parallel trends in the fields of US and African American History, it contends that scholars can and should seek out the nexus of the former’s “transnational turn” and what Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “global vision” of the latter. It explains how the articles of this special issue contribute to that goal through their collective assessment of Black internationalism in the Age of Emancipation, a period that began with the Atlantic revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, included the US Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and culminated at the end of the nineteenth century with the final abolitions of American slavery and the emergence of new European and US imperialisms.