Iconoclast

Clarence E. Walker resisted an ahistorical American exceptionalism. In essays like those collected in Deromanticizing Black History, he asked scholars to widen their timeframe and geographical scope, to borrow from films, literature, oral histories, and music, and to move towards a global and comparative history. Passionate in his drive to understand race in nineteenth-century US, he drew from everywhere: the Jewish experiences in Europe, the writings of Karl Marx, the caste system in India, the history of the working class in Britain, black acculturation in the British West Indies and in Portugese Brazil, the struggles of indigenous communities in the US and also in Canada and Australia, the assimilation of the Irish but not the Chinese migrants. An avid student of culture, he did not mistake cultural influence for economic and political heft.