Dr. Rachel Gillet – First your Country, Then your Rights: Race and the Rhetoric of Citizenship in World War One (Cultural History Seminar UU)

On 23 February Dr Rachel Gillett (Cultural History) will give the lecture ‘First your Country, Then your Rights: Race and the Rhetoric of Citizenship in World War One’. The lecture is part of the Cultural History Seminar series. 

W.E.B. Du Bois famously, and controversially, urged fellow African Americans to sign up for military service in World War One, hoping that they would win political rights and civic inclusion in return for their service. He was not alone in this hope. Across the world a variety of leaders of colonial subjects, indigenous peoples, and members of the African diaspora, rallied to the call of war. They were motivated by the hope of racial justice as much as the patriotism of national (or colonial) service. Rachel Gillett examines the transnational nature of that movement, and considers whether it can be identified as a “pre-Wilsonian moment” in which the alliances that later characterized the pan-African congress, and various other transnational anti-colonial movements began to form.

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