Description: This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese, and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international, and global history as well as migration, race, and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.
Brief description: Michael Goebel is a historian of modern Latin America in its global connections. He is currently Professor of Latin American and Global History at Freie Universität Berlin.
Review Quotes: "Anti-Imperial Metropolis will reorient the way we think about the global intellectual and political history of decolonization and nationalism, and deserves to be essential reading in both undergraduate and graduate courses on modern international affairs. Michael Goebel's thought-provoking account of the role played by migrant intellectuals from diverse regions of the world living in interwar Paris in creating the post-imperial imagination of the world order helps us better understand the curious links among nationalism, internationalism, and social history of immigration to Europe from the colonies. This is indeed one of the best books I have read in recent times."
Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill