Nico Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism is an important and original work that traces the connections between movements for freedom in the United States and India from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Arguing, convincingly, for readers to understand and take seriously the significance of “expansive” notions of freedom, Slate puts together an impressive transnational history of ideas and people who crossed racial and national boundaries. In recent years, scholars of South Asia have begun to study twentieth-century history from a transnational perspective to include experiences, aspirations, and influences beyond the territorial boundaries of the region. The majority of these works have focused on the circulation of people, goods, and ideas between South Asia, other British colonies and Europe to highlight the extraterritorial influence and resonance of Indian anticolonial nationalism. Colored Cosmopolitanism reveals an intimate and deep history of connections between India and the United States during this time that complements this scholarship without resurrecting imperial connections as the primary interlocutor for transnational nationalists, even as it highlights the importance of anticolonial aspirations in the “shared struggle for freedom”. More significantly, Slate focuses on the links made by African American and Indian activists – a history that has been obscured due to South Asian and American historiographical predilections for racially-bounded narratives. Through painstaking research on individuals who left behind voluminous writings, Slate argues for the need to study the history of African American and Indian movements for freedom as a “shared” history. What is most interesting is the way in which this history was shared: through physical travel, imaginative travel (of ideas), translation, rhetoric, comparison, aspirations, influences, resonance, attempts at mobilization, and local application. Slate demonstrates that no matter how particular ideas, people, movements, and their legacies may seem, removing the veil of their local origin and context helps historians recover the universalizing potential in them.

While Colored Cosmopolitanism is an important work because of the originality of the history traced in it, its significance goes beyond merely uncovering a hidden history. It serves as an analytical model in transnational historiography that suggests new ways in which to consider connections between people and ideas. The book offers seven analytical approaches to understanding the exchange and resonance of ideas of freedom, evocatively phrased as transnational analogies, racial diplomacy, colored cosmopolitanism, soul force, global double victory, third world, and non-violence and the nation.

Chapter 1 underscores the creative use and ambiguities of transnational analogies made by activists and thinkers in the late nineteenth century regarding race and caste in India and the United States. Slate examines the ways in which Swami Vivekananda used transnational analogies during his time in the United States to understand and criticize casteist and racist hierarchies towards two paradoxical ends. First, in comparing the treatment of African Americans and lower-caste Hindus, Vivekananda pushed forward his agenda as a social reformer aspiring to equality. Second, he pointed to the history of white supremacy in the United States to defend India against Western critiques of caste. However, in neither case did Vivekananda and his contemporaries completely disown the hierarchies of race and caste. Indeed he, much like M. K. Gandhi, reproduced common racial stereotypes about Africans in marking them as civilizationally distinct from Indians, thus limiting this moment of “shared” history to transnational analogy.

Chapter 2 recovers conversations between Black and Indian activists during and immediately after the First World War. Looking at transnational analogies made by Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gandhi, this chapter considers the ways in which activists across two different geographical, political and racial contexts expressed solidarity through “racial diplomacy”. Rai spent five years in the United States and developed close friendships with African-American leaders, commenting on the common experience of exploitation, while Du Bois became increasingly interested in Indian freedom movements. The perceived success of Gandhi's non-violent leadership of the non-cooperation movement also caught the attention of Marcus Garvey, who saw it in terms of a racial struggle that could serve as a model for “the Negroes of the world”. However, Slate argues that expressions of solidarity and inspirational comparisons were limited in scope as racial categories remained uncontested and un-transgressed. Even as Rai, Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore acknowledged the similarity of being at the receiving end of oppression, they deflected Western criticism of Indian caste hierarchies by arguing that American racism was worse than caste inequalities. Slate shows the limits of racial diplomacy as Indian nationalists utilized transnational comparisons between African Americans and Dalits to rank injustices and defend their nation rather than forge meaningful collaborations.

The book title borrows from Chapter 3, “Colored Cosmopolitanism”, which appears in Slate's history as a triumphant moment of great analytical purchase and the embodiment of the possibilities of meaningful collaborations between Black and Indian activists. Slate excels in this chapter in his analysis of Du Bois' approach to the “color line” and its transnational importance and resonance. As he succinctly puts it, “colored cosmopolitanism allowed them to articulate inclusive humanism that defied narrow, chauvinist definitions of race, religion, or nation while simultaneously defending the unity of ‘colored’ peoples”. Moving beyond transnational analogies and racial diplomacy that made possible expressions of solidarity at the rhetorical level while maintaining racially exclusive spheres of imagination and activism, Du Bois, John Edward Bruce and Cedric Dover universalized the experience of being dark-skinned, creating the opportunity for overlapping “solidarities of resistance” that were simultaneously local and cosmopolitan. This is an important new way of analyzing race from a non-white perspective that de-centers black–white and black–brown interactions as the main discourse around which racial thought was shaped and contested.

Although limited, at this point, to the realm of ideas and rhetoric as expressions of solidarity and possible opportunities, this is an important turning point in the book. The Second World War created the opportunity for activists across America and India to band together in the hope of a “global double victory” that would end imperialism and racism. African Americans supported India's anticolonial movement, viewing colonialism as a form of racism, while Indians pointed to racism in America to expose the hypocrisy of the Allies' proclamations of racial equality and freedom. Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya traveled extensively in the United States, especially the south, and concluded, “Because of our color we [Indians] feel a racial kinship with other colored peoples.” Like with Du Bois, Slate is extremely convincing in showing how Chattopadhyaya embraced colored cosmopolitanism, using race and the experience of being oppressed due to it as the entry point into forging meaningful solidarities between colored people of the world. This rhetoric, however, revealed its limits in attempts to build a “Third World”. Post independence, black advocates of colored cosmopolitanism turned to India in the hope that her leaders would use their recent anticolonial victory to champion their cause. Instead, statesmen such as Nehru continued to express solidarity but failed to make this rhetoric meaningful as they remained muted in public regarding American racism, especially in conversations with US state officials. India's need for international aid and the tenuous relationship between the two nations due to the Cold War mediated colored cosmopolitanism, resulting in the abandonment of the “expansive” notions of freedom that Indians had talked about as colonized subjects. Du Bois and Dover expressed disappointment as it became clear to them that the concerns of the Indian nation-state trumped transnational solidarities based on race. The book ends on a less pessimistic note as the global double victory was achieved by African Americans in the late 1960s. Black activists had long debated the applicability of Gandhian civil disobedience and nonviolence during his lifetime, but largely stayed away from early initiatives to implement satyagraha locally, pointing to the different contexts of Indian and African American struggles for freedom. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who used Gandhi's legacy, reduced, as Slate argues, to a simple rendering of nonviolence to successfully put into practice the idea of colored cosmopolitanism in the Civil Rights Movement, at least briefly.

Overall, Colored Cosmopolitanism is at its best when analyzing the ideas and movements led by Du Bois, Dover, King Jr. and Chattopadhyaya. Slate convincingly argues for the importance of taking seriously expressions of colored solidarity that questioned and transcended but did not efface racial and national boundaries. While he is keen to highlight the multidirectionality of influences, Slate's evidence suggests that, with the exception of Chattopadhyaya, Indian activists were interested and actively engaged with African American experiences and initiatives but stopped short of fully embracing colored cosmopolitanism in theory and practice in the way that many Black leaders did. Although he focuses on the post-colonial, Cold War context in which this occurs, Chapter 4 anticipates this hesitance. In “Soul Force”, Slate looks at Gandhi's interactions with African Americans, especially Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and travelers in India. In the 1930s Gandhi began to use transnational analogies between the (mis)treatment of untouchables and African Americans not to compare or rank them (as Vivekananda and Rai had) but to criticize both casteism and racism. As evidence of Gandhi's embrace of colored cosmopolitanism, Slate argues that a shift occurred in Gandhi's conceptualization of race and caste based primarily on these interactions. He underscores Gandhi's 1930s proclamation that “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world”, which was entirely different from his attitude toward Africans in South Africa and a change in Gandhi's initial desire to remove untouchability but preserve caste to rejecting caste altogether. Although this chapter offers fascinating new material on Gandhi, it is less convincing in demonstrating Gandhi's colored cosmopolitanism and the centrality of his connections with African Americans in resulting in ideological shifts. There is no doubt that Gandhi's views changed over time. However, based on the evidence presented throughout the book, Gandhi stops short of embracing the idea of unity/sameness amongst colored people of the world even as he was emphatic in his expressions of solidarity with the same. Seen from this perspective, Nehru's distancing of India from the global double victory followed the same trajectory as Indian activists who came before him. This interpretative difference does not take away from Slate's larger argument to demonstrate the transnational dimensions of Gandhi's thinking, but it serves as a reminder to scholars of the difficulty in quantifying the influence of ideas and their multidirectionality when we turn to their applicability and examine the ruptures between the intellectual exchange of ideas and attempts to put them into meaningful practice.

Given its innovative new approach to the study of transnational history, Colored Cosmopolitanism will no doubt serve as an inspiration and interlocutor for a new body of work in coming years for scholars of both South Asia and America.