by Disha Karnad Jani
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Sam Klug about his new book The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this book, Klug explores how the process of decolonization in the 1940s–70s transformed US debates about the role of race in American life, via the analogy of the “internal colony.” The comparison between how race operated in the US and how colonialism functioned in the world was taken up by activists, social scientists, and policymakers alike, and transformed how Black social movements and the US government approached their respective attempts to change American society at the level of race, class, and global politics.
Sam Klug is Assistant Teaching Professor in US History at Loyola University Maryland. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2020, and is the author of The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927–1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
Featured image: Cover of The Internal Colony, courtesy of University of Chicago Press.
