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W. E. B. Du Bois fiercely criticized the duplicity of the Cold War Americanization of racial justice, but his sense of liberal pluralism’s earlier rise in the transwar transpacific has been neglected. This is because he has been framed as capitulating to it with his support of the pan-Asianist strategy of Imperial Japan. By turning to what Torsten Weber has called “pan-Asianism from below,” Willaims reframes Du Bois beyond this impression. This presentation unpacks elements of his 2022 article in American Studies regarding Du Bois’ engagement with pan-Asianism, his 1928 novel Dark Princess as queer praxis, and his overlooked “color line within a color line” formulation concerning the projected future of global racial capitalism. Willaims also considers what Du Bois and the transwar transpacific can tell us about why America is behaving so erratically vis-a-vis China’s rise today.

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