In this course we will examine a specific strain of black cultural studies, namely that aspect of black cultural studies that has promoted a critique of modern liberal, marxist and revolutionary nationalist thought. Particular attention will be paid to the traditions of black radicalism, black feminisms, and black “queer of color” critique. The course will also pursue a discussion of a very specific archive of black social life with which to think about the kinds of possibilities that are released when these critical traditions put under erasure the universalizing categories that organize liberal, marxist, and revolutionary nationalist histories. Hence, we will examine the social forces that were brought to bear on black racial formation in the U.S. during the interwar years (1920s-1940s) and that were discussed under the rubric of “internationalism.” We will concentrate on how these social forces overdetermined the contradictions of black citizenship, precipitating a black internationalist subject that was not a citizen. For historically specific reasons that “subject” was produced and stabilized through an identification with the “Asiatic” in this period. Requiring a subject-position that was not the citizen, but its contradictory, disidentified and contiguous “other,” black intellectuals promoted an internationalism that was at once an interracialism, a specific politics of identification that linked and fused together incommensurable historical conditions and contexts through an internationalist anti-racist framework. The course will examine the emergence in this period of narratives and social practices of what I term “black alienage,” specifically inspecting these practices in relation to the social history of Asian immigrants and U.S. representation of Asia(n)s as the subjects and object of juridico-cultural alienage. In doing so, we will not be seeking merely to demonstrate a black-Asian interracialism founded on shared racial exclusion from the juridical and cultural life of “whiteness.” Rather, we will seek to argue that the history of Asian migration to the U.S. and U.S. imperialism in Asia are inextricable from the emergence of black racial formation during the inter-war years. It is this history, among others, that the universalizing categories of modern liberal, marxist and revolutionary nationalist thought continue to make a difficulty to “think”.