What was it like being a black soldier in the Great War to liberate Europe? How did the Western armed forces regard their black soldiers? What are their lessons for the conflicts of today?
Dr. Saje Mathieu (Yale - University of Minnesota - Heidelberg Center for American Studies)
Monday, April 22, 9:00 to 11:00 AM, room J3093, Jinonice
The first 15 people get a soft boiled egg and a glass of champagne!
During World War One’s brief four year turmoil, France moved from a nation with a small, largely urban black population to a country that housed more than one million black combatants from various national, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. Black Canadians served as sentries in the Jura Mountains,
Black South Africans manned the Ypres countryside at tremendous cost though limited reward, West
Indians did battle on the Western Front’s most dangerous salients, and African Americans stood guard from St-Mihiel to the Somme. For their part, the tirailleurs Sénégalais kept purring France’s ‘Sacred
Way,’ the crucial lifeline between Bar-le-Duc and Verdun, the single road that kept alive France’s hopes against Germany’s unrelentingly punishing assaults.
Regardless of their nationalities, the deployment of black soldiers to France presented both political and practical challenges for military command, and French society more broadly. Misgivings about black soldiers’ fitness for combat, reservations about their entitlement to the privileges of citizenship, their moral fortitude, or their place in the great debate about war and democracy each shaped how black soldiers were put to work for the Great War effort. This paper will explore how French, British, and
American commanders rationalized the use of black troops in the Great War by institutionalizing racial tenets that either played up black men’s fighting spirit or weakened perceptions of black martial heroism.
The paper is particularly invested in a comparative examination of the long-term social and political impact of such racial policies both in France during the war, and in the countries sending black men to the front. I argue that through their experiences on the Western Front, black men forged transnational, radicalized, and galvanized models of resistance that they carried with them into battle as well as when they returned home after the war. This paper will analyze how, when, and where such alliances took shape and to what effect they took root in the aftermath of the Great War.
Prof. Saje Mathieu, Ph.D.
is Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies of the University of
Heidelberg. Prof. Mathieu specializes in twentieth century American and African American history with an emphasis on immigration, war, race, globalization, social movements, and political resistance. Her current book project, 1919: Race, Riot, and
Revolution , investigates how black intellectual-activists galvanized new transnational models of political resistance in response to international outbreaks of racialized violence. Prof. Dr. Mathieu is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.

Is There a Transatlantic Hip Hop Culture?
Are We Living in an Age of Global Hip Hop Revolution?
What Are the Revolutionary Elements of Hip Hop?
Jens Althoff
(The University of Iowa - TU Dortmund University - Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
Thursday, April 25, 14:00 – 15:30 PM, room J1035, Jinonice
It has been roughly 40 years since the beginning of the cultural movement we call Hip Hop. What started in the South Bronx as a local development has grown into a global culture with its own elements in music, language and fashion - and more importantly, a global movement that provides a voice of expression to those who are otherwise denied. Today we find Hip Hop on every single continent in many different countries, and although these Hip Hop scenes may be different, they are all connected by the same elements and principles. While the reach of Hip Hop culture is Transatlantic as well as global, several of its elements contain the potential for revolution. The aim of this lecture is to provide an insight into global
Hip Hop culture and highlight several key aspects that make Hip Hop a global phenomenon and an important element of Cultural Studies.
Jens Althoff is in his final semester of the Masters program in English, American Studies and History at
TU Dortmund University and Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Jens specializes in the study of local and global Hip Hop music and culture, and has lectured on the specific characteristics of the local
Dortmund and Bochum Hip Hop scenes. Among others, he helped organize the international conference
HipHop im Revier: Identitäten – Ökonomien – Politiken at TU Dortmund University (July 2010), and he also gave a talk titled “The Influence of Blaxploitation on Hip Hop Music” at the international conference
Show and Prove: The Tensions, Contradictions, and Possibilities of Hip Hop Studies in Practice
(September 2010) at New York University, New York, USA. In the academic year 2010 -2011 Jens studied
American Studies at The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA .