1903: Racism, Revenge, and Ressentiment

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Peter Perdue on the international discourse of racial nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Peter C. Perdue, History Department, Yale University
Colleen Lye, Discussant. Department of English, UC Berkeley

In 1903, a pamphlet entitled The Revolutionary Army (Gemingjun), with essays by the young radical nationalist Zou Rong and the scholar Zhang Taiyan,  advocated a violent anti-Manchu nationalist ideology to a broad audience of students in Japan and China. In the same year, W.E.B. Dubois published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he stated that “the twentieth century will be the century of the color line.” In this period, racial nationalism, radical movements, and advocacy of violence converged in a series of global movements linking Asia, Europe, and the United States. This talk examines the international discourse of racial nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century.