Brenda Gayle Plummer

Brenda Gayle Plummer

Emeritus Professor

bplummer@wisc.edu

608.263.1845

Office: 5111 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4011 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: TBA
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
 
Joint Appointment: African American Studies

Brenda Gayle Plummer

Biography

Biography

My specializations are African American history, the United States in the 20th century, Caribbean history, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. I am currently working on a study of race and race making in the world of commercial travel.

Education

Ph.D., Cornell University
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., Antioch College

Books

In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974

Brenda Gayle Plummer. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

In Search of Power is a history of the era of civil rights, decolonization, and Black Power. In the critical period from 1956 to 1974, the emergence of newly independent states worldwide and the struggles of the civil rights movement in the United States exposed the limits of racial integration and political freedom. Dissidents, leaders, and elites alike were linked in a struggle for power in a world where the rules of the game had changed. Brenda Gayle Plummer traces the detailed connections between African Americans’ involvement in international affairs and how they shaped American foreign policy, integrating African American history, the history of the African Diaspora, and the history of United States foreign relations. These topics, usually treated separately, not only offer a unified view of the period but also reassess controversies and events that punctuated this colorful era of upheaval and change. Unites African American history with the history of US foreign affairs Presents African American history as transnational Examines the ways in which both dissidents and elites were involved in the pursuit of power

Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988

Brenda Gayle Plummer (Editor). Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

The civil rights movement in the United States drew strength from supporters of human rights worldwide. Once U.S. policy makers–influenced by international pressure, the courage of ordinary American citizens, and a desire for global leadership–had signed such documents as the United Nations charter, domestic calls for change could be based squarely on the moral authority of doctrines the United States endorsed abroad. This is one of the many fascinating links between racial politics and international affairs explored in Window on Freedom. Broad in chronological scope and topical diversity, the ten original essays presented here demonstrate how the roots of U.S. foreign policy have been embedded in social, economic, and cultural factors of domestic as well as foreign origin. They argue persuasively that the campaign to realize full civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities in America is best understood in the context of competitive international relations. The contributors are Carol Anderson, Donald R. Culverson, Mary L. Dudziak, Cary Fraser, Gerald Horne, Michael Krenn, Paul Gordon Lauren, Thomas Noer, Lorena Oropeza, and Brenda Gayle Plummer.

Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960

Brenda Gayle Plummer. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

African Americans have a long history of active involvement and interest in international affairs, but their efforts have been largely ignored by scholars of American foreign policy. Gayle Plummer brings a new perspective to the study of twentieth-century American history with her analysis of black Americans’ engagement with international issues, from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 through the wave of African independence movements of the early 1960s. Plummer first examines how collective definitions of ethnic identity, race, and racism have influenced African American views on foreign affairs. She then probes specific developments in the international arena that galvanized the black community, including the rise of fascism, World War II, the emergence of human rights as a factor in international law, the Cold War, and the American civil rights movement, which had important foreign policy implications. However, she demonstrates that not all African Americans held the same views on particular issues and that a variety of considerations helped shape foreign affairs agendas within the black community just as in American society at large.

Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment

Brenda Gayle Plummer. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. University of Georgia Press, 1992.

In a prescient remark made at the turn of the century, U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root said that establishing “the right sort of relations” with Haiti must await “the psychological moment.” Indeed, as Brenda Gayle Plummer notes, much of the Haitian-U.S. relationship has turned on matters of perception. For many in the United States, tales of voodoo, political violence, and stark deprivation have made Haiti appear to be a doomed land, beyond comprehension and help. Haitians, meanwhile, have often seen the United States as persistently racist, grossly materialist, and lacking in spiritual values. In Haiti and the United States, Plummer pays special attention to the role of social and cultural factors in the two countries’ views of each other and the manner in which relations have developed as a result of those perceptions. The disparities between the two republics, she notes, are all the more remarkable in that their experiences of anticolonial rebellion and nationhood converged in some striking ways. Despite the parallels, however, the varying cultural and racial identities of Haiti and the United States and the sociohistorical context in which those identities have been construed forced them to confront the challenges of slavery, republicanism, democracy, and economic development quite differently. Stressing the importance of domestic policy and the character of civil society in the formation of foreign policy, Plummer illuminates the various factors that figured in the relationship between the two countries throughout the nineteenth century. She discussed the aspirations of Haiti’s founders in building a self-governing black society, Haitian responses to the transatlantic abolition movement, the development of Haiti’s creole culture, and the country’s shrewd negotiations with the United States over commercial and strategic issues. The late 1800s, Plummer shows, proved a turning point in Haitian-U.S. relations as Washington’s assumption of regional hegemony changed the balance of power for a Haiti long committed to a multilateralist diplomacy. In the twentieth century, tensions between traditional and reformist elements in Haitian society erupted in a crisis that brought U.S. intervention and long-term military occupation. Plummer examines the consequences of this intervention as they were incorporated into the later interactions between the United States and Haiti and shows how these troubled relations contributed to the rise of the repressive Duvalier regime. The recent fall of that regime, Plummer suggests, now presents the “psychological moment” to which Elihu Root referred so many years ago. Haiti and the United States is the first history of the relationship between the two countries to be published since the 1940s. Utilizing a wealth of Haitian sources as well as the voluminous state papers in the National Archives of the United States and the Library of Congress, the book also benefits from methodological and conceptual advances in diplomatic history over the past half-century.

Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-1915

Brenda Gayle Plummer. Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-1915. Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902-1915 examines a critical period of Haitian history and diplomacy. In this widely researched and persuasively argued study, Brenda Gayle Plummer contends that the social, economic, and political decline of Haiti during the early part of the century was hastened by many factors: the growing commercial and military competition in the Caribbean among the great powers; the less favorable terms of trade; the development among the cosmopolitan urban elite of a culture of imitation and alienation from Haitian national values; and the inability of traditional political mechanisms to provide satisfactory solutions to new problems. The significance of Plummer’s study is threefold. First, there are few reputable and current English-language texts on Haiti. Lurid, sensational, and racist books have been written, but the North American reading public has not been encouraged to take Haitian subjects seriously. Second, Plummer’s work, breaking out of the tradition of considering Haiti as a case apart, attempts to place the nation in the context of a broader Caribbean history. Plummer views Haiti’s experience as the first “Third World” republic as both admonitory and heuristic. Finally Haiti and the Great Powers synthesizes much of the growing mass of data about the period and offers fresh interpretations. Plummer is concerned not only with statecraft but with a host of factors that are pertinent to a holistic consideration of societal change. Her research thus includes governmental archives, personal manuscript collections, the contemporary periodical press, Haitian language and polemics, interviews, and biographies. Plummer examines a rich, complex society without the reductionism inherent in a treatment of diplomatic, political, or social history. The result of Plummer’s extensive research is a highly original, provocative, and engaging study.

Advisor To

Selected Awards

  • Evjue Bascom Chair in African American Studies
  • Institute for Research in the Humanities Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellowship, Spring 2023
  • Karen Johnson Teaching Award, History department, 2021
  • Association of Marquette University Women (AMUW) Women’s Chair in Humanistic Studies 2017

History Courses