Dissertation

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Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity (1971-1987)

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My dissertation, which now forms the basis of my book manuscript, presents a new social and political history of the anti-apartheid movement. This project, based on an examination of extensive oral histories and multilingual archival materials from the United States and South Africa, complicates the role of corporate governance in South Africa during the late apartheid era. While scholars have studied the anti-apartheid movement from the angle of U.S. corporations and top-down reforms, my work focuses on workers and their efforts to fight apartheid. Employed by multinational corporations and devoted to building international networks, particularly with Black trade unionists and politicians in the United States, these workers created what I call “anti-apartheid worker internationalism.” By leveraging reformist U.S. anti-racism workplace codes of conduct, and by making common cause with an increasingly robust transnational anti-apartheid movement and community solidarity, South African workers across lines of race and class challenged U.S. multinationals and management in both the United States and South Africa. Diplomacy at Work argues that workers and trade unionists in both South Africa and the United States were central to the global anti-apartheid movement and to the unraveling of apartheid in the workplace, using their shared goals to build anti-racist conjunctions across borders.

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