The Mississippi Runs into the Mekong: Colonial Collisions & Recursions

The concept of "internal colonialism" has long been dismissed as insufficient for capturing the dynamics of racial domination in the United States: a powerful piece of rhetoric, perhaps, but a metaphor inattentive to the important distinctions between foreign or settler colonization and domestic racial oppression. This essay reassesses this view of the "internal colony" as mere analogy by excavating an alternative theory that emerges out of the Black radical praxis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's work organizing against the Vietnam War. Drawing on the work of Black anti-draft organizers in SNCC alongside works by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jack O’Dell, this chapter reconstructs a conception of internal colonialism not as analogy but as analytic—a means of tracing colonialism’s collisions and recursions as they crisscrossed the boundaries between foreign and domestic, subjecting differently situated peoples to constitutively linked forms of racial-colonial violence.