This seminar frames the current moment of solidarity politics—facilitated by innovations in information and communication technologies––through histories of radical internationalism in the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The seminar begins with movements from the interwar period, such as the All-American Anti-Imperialist League based in Mexico City beginning in the 1920s. It then moves to non-alignment, the impact of Bandung humanism in the Americas, as well as the Tricontinental, and ends with contemporary movements like the Movement for Black Lives and contemporary writings on racial capitalism. The seminar considers how various internationalist political movements in the twentieth century have sought to combine a global anti-capitalist struggle with racial justice activism and traces the distinct discourses and aesthetics through which they have done so. Through looking back at the contributions and shortcomings of these understudied histories, this seminar will consider the insights they offer to our political imagination today.
Class 1: Communist Internationalism and Black Radicalism
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Hakim Adi, “The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years,” in From
Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (2009)
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Ricardo Melgar Bao, “The Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas between the East and Latin
America” in Latin American Perspectives 35.2 (March 2008): 9-24.
Class 2: Anticolonialism and Bandung Humanism
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Selections from Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956)
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Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (2010).
Class 3: Tricontinentalism
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Robert J.C. Young, “Postcolonialism: From Bandung to the Tricontinental.” Historein 5 (2005)
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Anne Garland Mahler, “In the Belly of the Beast: African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens,” in From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (2018)
Class 4: Contemporary Solidarity Politics and the New Racial Capitalism
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Selections from Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011)
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Catherine Walsh, “Afro In/Exclusion, Resistance and the ‘Progressive’ State: (De)Colonial Struggles, Questions, and Reflections” in Black Social Movements in Latin America (2012)