The Centre for Geopolitics warmly invites you to an online panel discussion held jointly with Cambridge in America as part of the 2020 Alumni festival on
The Global Colour Line
Wednesday 23 September, 17.00 – 18.00 (UK time)
Nearly 120 years ago, the African-American writer W.E.B. du Bois first spoke of the ‘colour line’ and predicted that it would define the twentieth century. More recently, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, has had huge international ramifications which suggests that the issue persists down to the present day. But has there really been a ‘global colour line’ in the past, and if so when was it drawn, whom did it divide, and does it still operate? The Centre for Geopolitics Cambridge and Cambridge in America have convened a panel of experts to discuss this pressing question in its wider historical and political context.
Panellists:
Chair: Dr Shruti Kapila, Lecturer, Faculty of History and Fellow and Director of Studies at Corpus Christi College – Shruti lectures and researches on modern Indian history, political thought and global history. She is editor of An Intellectual History for India (CUP, 2010) and co-editor of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India (CUP, 2013). She is currently completing a book on political ideologies and violence in twentieth century India. She does commentary, most recently on Indian elections for BBC (radio and television) Bloomberg TV and Al-Jazeera and for print media including, Financial Times, Economic Times, Outlook and Indian Express.
Professor Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Faculty of History and Fellow, Magdalene College – Saul has written extensively about the history of racial science in South Africa, from paleontology and human origins, to psychology, history, medicine, and anthropology. His ongoing interests lie in the history of segregation and apartheid; in Commonwealth, imperial and post-colonial history; in the history of science; and in the political dimensions of global intellectual thought.
Dr Arjun Sharath, Centre for Geopolitics – Arjun recently finished his PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focused on the role of race in geopolitics and immigration. He specifically examined how contemporary theories of race influenced the foreign policy preferences of the United States and the United Kingdom towards each other, Germany, other great powers at the turn of the last century.
Dr Chika Tonooka, Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History, Pembroke College – Chika is an international historian of the twentieth century. She is currently working on a book project examining British responses to the rise of imperial Japan in the early twentieth century. Chika is a member of the ‘Reimagining World Order’ project to be launched this fall at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Affairs. She read History (BA) at St. Catharine’s College and completed her PhD, also in History, at Gonville & Caius College.
To register for the event, please click here.
Please note: registration closes at 9am BST on 21 September. The event is being hosted by the Alumni Festival 2020, but is also open to friends of the Centre for Geopolitics. If you are not an alumni of the University, please leave those fields of the registration form blank.
