W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-­line” (1903, vii). Du Bois’s words have been quoted extensively, and it would be hard to find a more cited passage in African American letters. Yet the proverbial problem, as it has been often cited from The Souls of Black Folk, has been routinely deployed as a prophetic observation principally concerned with the domestic plight of African Americans. Hard on the heels of the failures of Reconstruction, the persistence of white supremacy, and the legal codification of Jim Crow, “the color-­line” has remained an opening salvo for grappling with the conundrum of race and racial oppression on U.S. soil. Yet, if one continues to read the adjoining words that follow Du Bois’s most famous utterance, one will note that his declaration extended far beyond the domestic confines of the United States. Indeed, the color-­line was “in the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia, in America and the islands of the sea” (1903, 13). The color-­line was global and crisscrossed oceans, continents, nations, and empires. African life in the Western Hemisphere always sat at the vortex...