Paper-abstracts for the RADICAL AMERICAS conference at
UCL, January 2013- in order of appearance
Panel 1A: Solidarity, Independence and Internationalism (UCL WH)
Teresa Huhle (University of Bremen) - American Radicals or Radical
Internationalists? The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the
Commemoration of the Spanish Civil War in the United States
“No men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.”1 Seventythree
years after Hemingway’s praise, the almost 3000 US-American men and women known as
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought in the International Brigades in defense of the
Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) still hold a special place as antifascist heroes in the collective memory of the radical left in the United States. This memory
has been primarily shaped by two organizations: The returning volunteers, most of them
members of the Communist Party or the Communist Youth Organization of the United
States, organized as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade/VALB (1937-2008), and a
community of sympathetic academics, activists and family members who founded the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives/ALBA in 1979. Drawing upon archival material2 and Oral
History interviews conducted with 12 members of the ALBA and VALB in 2008, the paper will
analise the politics of commemoration of these two organizations, looking both at the
legitimating effects of the Spanish legacy for their radical political activism (e.g. anti-Vietnam
protests, solidarity movement with Nicaragua) and their commemorative rituals and
materializations (annual reunions, monuments) in the United States and in Spain. The paper
will show how in this community of memory the narrative about the Spanish Civil War and the
Lincoln Brigade’s role in it, has been repeatedly discussed, negotiated and agreed on. It will
argue that the central debate throughout the last seventy years has been on whether to
commemorate the Lincoln Brigade in a radical democratic US- American or in an
internationalist communist working class tradition. In times when these traditions have been
difficult to combine (e.g. after the Krushchev revelations of 1956) the concept of anti-fascism
and the remembrance of Spain as the last „Good Fight“ has held the community together.
1 Ernest Hemingway, “On the American Dead in Spain“, in: New Masses, 30, 8, 02/14/1939, original
reproduced in: Nelson, Cary (ed.), Remembering Spain: Hemingway's Civil War Eulogy and the
Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Urbana; Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press 1994, p. 36.
2 “Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive Collection”, Tamiment Library, New York University.
Juan Pablo Scarfi (University of Cambridge) - Latin American AntiImperialisms, 1898-1928
Modern Latin American anti-imperialist ideology has tended to be associated with a
single unitary movement and has been regarded by classic and recent historiography as
literary and culturally oriented. It has also been argued that Latin American anti-imperialist
ideologues did not put forward a solid and consistent political analysis of the foundations and
nature of U.S. imperialism in the region. Nevertheless, since the late nineteenth century until
1930, there have been a wide variety of discourses, languages, figures and ideological
traditions that sought to confront and resist U.S. ascendancy as a hegemonic power in the
Americas. This paper seeks to address such diversity, tracing a typology of Latin American
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anti-imperialisms. In order to trace a historical typology of modern Latin American antiimperialisms, I will focus on both the contextual dimension and the conceptual analysis of
such variety of discourses and ideologies. As regards, the contextual dimension, I will
distinguish between three historical periods: the emergence of Pan-Americanism (1890) and
U.S. interventionist policies in the Caribbean and Central America (1898), the Mexican
Revolution and U.S. intervention in Veracruz (1914) and the Latin American University
Reform (1918) and its legacy through to the late 1920s. As regards the conceptual analysis, I
will advance a distinction between three varieties of Latin American anti-imperialism: literary
and cultural modernism (Martí, Rodó, Darío), legalistic and diplomatic anti-imperialism
(conservative and progressive) and Marxist, socialist and popular anti-imperialism (antiimperialist communist and socialist leagues and intellectual and student organisations). In
this paper, I will argue that there have been a wide range of Latin American antiimperialisms, some of which were informed by a combination of these three varieties and
also a solid and consistent critique of the nature of U.S. imperialism in the region.
Aaron Moulton (University of Arkansas) - The Vision of la ‘Revolución del
Caribe’:The Transnational Anti-Dictatorship Ideology of Exiles in Central
America and the Caribbean, 1944-1959
This paper utilizes the writings (memoirs, pamphlets, manifestos) of Central American and
Caribbean exiles in the 1940s and 1950s to analyze the emergence of a radical,
transnational vision that targeted the region’s notorious dictatorships. This era witnessed
dictators’ consolidation of power within their various nation-states, most notably the
Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. However, this same development promoted the
formation of exile communities and organizations. In the face of repression and
counterrevolution at their nations of origin, these exiles formed a larger vision which tied
together their individual struggles. A transnational, anti-dictatorship ideology emerged that
drew upon the experiences of exiles throughout the region, uniting groups such as the
Caribbean Legion. This paper examines the intellectual and historical framework behind this
transnational ideology.
This paper also illuminates the contested definitions of ‘revolution’ that created
tensions behind this anti-dictatorship ideology. Although the common struggle against
dictators could bring together exiles from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
and even Spain, individual exiles interpreted their movements through different lenses. Anticommunist exiles feared that communists dominated their parties and organizations. Radical
leftists alleged that their more conservative counterparts hindered the revolutionary struggle
against the region’s dictatorships. Consequently, competing claims of revolution created
schisms within exile communities. Dictators and US officials would ultimately manipulate
these divisions to contain the potential of this transnational movement in Central America
and the Caribbean.
Eric Larson (Harvard University) - Race, Radicalism, and the Puerto
Rican Independentistas on the Island and in the Urban U.S., 1976-1986
Puerto Rican independence activity has often straddled the boundaries between the
key historical and geographical contours of the twentieth-century Americas. The struggles of
the Nuevo Despertar era reflected how, throughout the Caribbean and Central America, the
era of decolonization and the rise of the New Left and identity-based politics overlapped for a
brief period in the 1960s and 1970s. They also reflected a late Cold War moment when some
of the epoch’s most explosive conflicts and deadly counter-insurgency laboratories shifted to
the Americas. My paper will explore how Puerto Rican radicals explored and inhabited these
transitions as they increasingly injected their demands for Puerto Rican independence with
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an anti-racism that reflected – but in contradictory ways – the racial justice sensitivities
inspired by Black Power and its hemispheric influences. Though the radicals linked to the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), like most independentistas, were light-skinned, male,
and highly educated, the networks of activists who emerged from the gradual fragmenting of
the party in the late 1970s probed the divisions and fissures of their own societies to
overcome the ethno-racial exclusions that helped lead to their parties’ demise. Because of
changing anti-colonial strategy and continued migration to the U.S. mainland, these party
activists increasingly accepted mainland Puerto Rican communities as legitimate targets of
their mass work. Ironically, the same activists who pushed for a radical break with the U.S.
took their cues on anti-racism from the community organizers they encountered in the urban
U.S.
Panel 1B: Ethnic Radicalisms and Race (IA Rm103)
Jared Bibler (Ohio University) - A Radical Approach to Race in
Guatemala: The Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms
This paper examines the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA),
and the organization’s perspectives on issues of race and ethnicity. ORPA was a politicalmilitary movement that operated in Guatemala from 1971-1996 during the country’s civil war.
Even though armed movements were common in Latin America at the time, and in fact two
movements were already operating in Guatemala, ORPA’s membership and ideology
represented new developments in Latin American radical thought. The organization broke
with the region’s contemporary Marxist-Leninist thought, and maintained that addressing
issues of race and ethnicity was just as important as addressing economic factors. In the
early 1970s, ORPA produced two lengthy internal documents on the history of racism in
Guatemala and its far-reaching effects in all aspects of society. While other revolutionary
movements in Guatemala would eventually publish statements on indigenous issues, the
analyses were firmly grounded in class analysis. ORPA, however, advocated a shift away
from historical materialism toward a creative and flexible ideology capable of responding to
the Guatemalan reality. This was especially clear in the movement’s analysis of the power of
ideas in socioeconomic and political relations, including the dominant ideologies of race and
ethnicity. The movement argued that the structure of Guatemalan society could not be
understood without first understanding the role of racism in the development of that structure.
This paper analyzes the organization’s perspectives on issues of race and ethnicity and
situates them in historical context.
John Radley Milstead (Michigan State University) - “A hole where we
should be:” Afro-Mexicans and Radical Federalism in Nineteenth Century
Mexico
Gazing over Antonio García Cubas’ exhaustive late nineteenth-century map of
Mexico’s racial and cultural landscape, it is possible discern the contours of the country’s
complex pre-Hispanic and colonial heritage. Although the cartographer included Spaniards
and mestizos, Tzotzils and Zapotecs, Tarahumara and Tarascans, one group – AfroMexicans – was missing. For García Cubas and many nineteenth-century intellectuals, men
and women of African descent did not comprise one of what he termed “Mexico’s many
nations.” Despite this dismissal, Afro-Mexicans had been fundamental to the creation of the
Mexican nation, as prominent radical leaders like José María Morelos, Vicente Guererro, and
Valerio Trujano, militiamen, soldiers, and federalist citizens.
This paper seeks to examine this contradiction by comparing elite nineteenth-century
appreciations of Mexico’s African heritage with the everyday political and socio-economic
engagements of Afro-Mexicans in the predominantly black district of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca.
Building on the work of late colonial scholars, bottom-up historians of state formation, and
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anthropologists of contemporary Latin American blackness, it is argued that Afro-Mexicans
formed the most powerful supporters of radical federalism during the nineteenth century.
Relatively unattached to indigenous corporate organizations, often employed in sensitive
intermediary roles as muleteers and small merchants, often trained in late colonial militias,
and inspired by the example of the Haitian Revolution, Afro-Mexicans formed a regional
vanguard, which pressed regional elites for greater political autonomy from the 1820s
through to the 1850s. Despite this, Porfirian liberals, like García Cubas, dismissed their
contribution, denying Afro-Mexicans a place in the new nation just as they denied radical
federalism’s importance to the emergence and victory of late nineteenth-century liberalism.
Prof. Steven Hirsch (Washington University) - Transnational Anarchism
and the “Indian Question” in Peru, 1898-1929
The relationship between anarchism and the indigenous inhabitants of Peru remains
woefully understudied. This is surprising given that anarchism was the dominant radical
ideology in Peru for the better part of the first three decades of the twentieth-century,
precisely at time when indigenous communities and movements mobilized against hacienda
expansion, coercive labor practices, working conditions in the mines and on plantations, and
military and road conscription. Equally troubling is the tendency in the scant scholarly
literature to oversimplify and dichotomize anarchism’s perception of and engagement with
indigenous Peruvians. On one hand, anarchists are said to have promoted a Eurocentric
approach to indigenous emancipation based on Western education, Spanish language
acquisition, and cultural uplift. On the other, it is claimed that anarchists underwent a process
of “andinization” and advocated a variant of indigenous millenarianism. Both interpretations
overlook and/or downplay the influence of transnational anarchism in shaping Peruvian
anarchism’s indigenous emancipatory project.
Transnational anarchism assumed many forms in Peru. This paper will highlight
the ways the international anarchist press catalyzed efforts by Peruvian anarchists to forge
urban worker-indigenous peasant alliances and to defend autonomous indigenous
communities based on cooperative labor and communal landholding. Here communication
with Mexican anarchists and the Flores Magon brothers was particularly important.
Transnational anarchist propaganda also contributed to the formation of indigenous anarchist
activists. Bi-lingual indigenous activists translated anarchist organizational models and
repertoires of struggle to the indigenous masses. Argentine and Chile anarchist militants in
Peru, with their ties to transnational networks, likewise promoted indigenous anarchist
organization and resistance, and an internationalist outlook. The IWW also had direct and
indirect contact with Peruvian anarchists and encouraged the development of multiracial
worker solidarity. This paper will reassess Peruvian anarchism’s multifaceted approach to the
‘Indian problem’ in the context of transnational anarchist flows of ideas, itinerant militants,
and networks.
Irène Favier (Paris VIII) - From Andean campesino to Amazonian nativo:
a Historical Shift in Peruvian Indigenous Radicalism
This paper aims at analyzing the political shift that occured in recent peruvian history.
First conceptualized by Jose Carlos Mariategui, peruvian indigenism focused on andean
peasant communities located on both central and southern altiplano, as opposed to Limabased central power (Mariategui, 1928). Peruvian radicalism indeed started denouncing the
ideologic and socio-racially based foundations of peruvian nation and state, in which
prevailed a eurocentric « coloniality of power » (Quijano, 2000).
Such an analysis, combined with the implementation of a new set of legal categories under
Juan Velasco Alvarado's atypical military regime, marginalized the populations of peruvian
Amazonia. However, recent events such as the known « massacre of the 5th of july, 2009 »
that occured in north-western Amazonia turned them into new figures of peruvian radicalism.
Native indigenous populations therefore took on a new, publically indeniable agency. This
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paper intends to analyze such a process of reshaping of peruvian indigenous radicalism, and
to highlight its main demands.
Panel 2A: Radicalism in Print (UCL WH)
Prof. Clive Bush (King’s College London) - Relations Between American
and European Writers on the Left During the Second World War: A
Forgotten History
What I shall aim to do in a short paper is to describe the contents of my recent book
The Century’s Midnight: dissenting European and American Writers in the Era of the Second
World War and indicate the way a number of American radical writers of the period
interacted with European radicals during a moment of total war. The early radicalism of the
Russian revolution had been crushed by Stalin by 1935 with most of the original Bolsheviks
slaughtered, and with Fascism in Italy and Spain and National Socialism in Germany having
destroyed both left and social democrat alike. The collusion of the Pope displayed the worst
aspects of organized religion. In short the triumphant destructions of Marxist-Leninism,
Capitalism, National Socialism, Fascism, and Christianity with their sanctioning “ideologies”
ghettoized with varying success radical thought and practice from the Russian
revolutionaries to the liberal Rooseveltian democrat and British Labourite.
From archives in the Library of Congress, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, my book
reconstructed multiple historical and literary narratives around five major figures: the PolishRussian, Victor Serge, the Americans: Dwight Macdonald, Dorothy Norman, Lewis Mumford
and Muriel Rukeyser. The correspondences reveal varyingly leftish international solidarity
and resistance (with practical assistance). The main sections are on Serge (Bolshevik then
Trotskyite, finally dissenting also from that) Dwight Macdonald (Trotskyite, finally wanting to
include ethics and subjectivity in his analysis), Norman (Rooseveltian democrat) Mumford
(Ibid) and Muriel Rukeyser a thirties left-wing American poet who had briefly been in Spain at
the outset of the Civil War. The international radical figures they engaged with, dealt with at
variable length in the book include Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin,
Dos Passos, George Orwell, Boris Pilniak, Albert Camus, Sartre, Ignacio Silone. My paper
will describe selectively some of these largely unknown personal and political histories, and
indicate some of the methodological and ideological challenges involved.
Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (Columbia University) - A Double
Anachronism?: Printed Books and State Politics in Chávez’s Venezuela
Despite sharing characteristics and continuities with the other historical cases—in
particular 1960s Cuba—, the political climate and imaginary of Venezuela, under Hugo
Chávez Frías’s presidency (1999-present), is also unique and may be inserted within new
political constellations: it is a government and project that borrows the symbolic
appropriations of the 1960s and early 1970s, yet whose economic structure is determined by
the geopolitics of oil that have characterized the post-Cold War era and marked its economic
and political conflicts. While the Latin American left of the 1960s spoke from the perspective
of the Vietnam War, the 1968 student movements, the anti-colonial movements in Africa, in
short, from the viewpoint of a climate of growing politicization world-wide, Chavez’s project is
forged within another conceptual constellation. This constellation finds its coordinates in part
within the world’s oil reserves (the first Gulf War, the War in Iraq), the same imaginary that
gave birth to the broad figure of the ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ that replaced the imaginary of
the Cold War (Zizek/Beverly). Thus, Venezuela pivots between older visions of
Panamericanism and brotherhood marked by traditionally geography, and allies defined by
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the oil geo-economic topography. This may be coupled with a new and ever more visible
relationship with consumerism that has subtly replaced more traditional forms of political
relations (Capriles/Aguilar).
Despite a focus on non-literacy based cultural programs (collective muralism as well as Villa
del Cine, the state-run film production company, are staple programs), mass literacy and
publishing have not been neglected in Venezuela’s cultural sphere. The Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela has established its own publishing house called El Perro y la Rana, that
functions within a greater state-run apparatus that includes projects that date from the 1970s.
In this paper, I would like to explore how the Chavista publishing project can be read as a
cultural endeavor as much outside its era (or anachronistic) as a challenge to its era, both
due to the cultural object in question —the printed book—, as well as to its insertion within a
vision of politics unequivocally located in the state structure. The research that will be
presented is thanks to a generous grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies at
Columbia University.
Dr. Ben Bollig (University of Oxford) - Punctum-Punk-Punctum: On the
Poetry of Martín Gambarotta.
1990s poetry in Argentina is known for its combination of colloquial language, the
influence of early US objectivist poetics, and a dialogue with near-contemporary “language”
(or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry, as well as a rebellion against earlier local styles, including
the so-called neobarroco and social or committed poetry (à la Juan Gelman). The 2011
republication of Martín Gambarotta’s 1996 collection Punctum offers the opportunity for new
readers to approach a seminal and striking volume that has long been unavailable.
Furthermore, it gives the chance to reflect on the complex poetics of a collection that, despite
its initial impression of a stark hermeticism or even banality, is suggestive of a range of
literary, poetic, and political implications. The political effect of Gambarotta’s work – a
breaking through the ideology of its contemporary neoliberalism, its cracking of the
consensus of menemismo – offers an untimely intervention in the mid 1990s; the aesthetic
work, mobilizing discourses of armed resistance and punk rock, allows us to unpick this
punctualintervention.
Sean Carleton (Trent University) - Radical Representations: Political
Graphic Novels as Activism in the 21st Century
Graphic novels are no longer just for kids; they are for adults, and they are for radical
activists and academics, too. In this paper the dissident history of comic books in North
America is surveyed and the new phenomenon of “graphic novels” analyzed in relation to
Paulo Freire’s concept of critical consciousness, or conscientização. The graphic medium
holds great potential for conscientização in the 21st century, as a form of radical pedagogy,
not only because of graphic novels’ popularity and accessibility, but also because graphic
works require readers to actively engage with the message of each book which can inspire a
shift in consciousness encouraging readers to take action in their own lives. Using Freire’s
concept of conscientização, the three recent Canadian graphic novels The 500 Years of
Resistance Comic Book, May Day: A Graphic History of Protest, and Shift in Progress: A
Not-So-Comic Book are examined and compared to other important international titles.
These political graphic works and their contributions to the literature on the left and labour in
Canada and the Americas make a case for the graphic novel as an important tool of radical
activism and create a space for academics to consider the various ways in which the graphic
medium can be further developed to cultivate conscientização in the 21st.
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Panel 2B: The Political Image (IA Rm103)
Dr. Jody Patterson (University of Plymouth) - ‘New York Only Yesterday’:
Anti-Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Abstract Painting on the Left in the 1930s
In an article published in 1957 the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg
reminisced about the state of painting in New York during the late 1930s. Acknowledging that
the Great Depression had ushered in a socially and politically tumultuous decade he
somewhat surprisingly recalled that ‘Abstract art was the main issue among artists I knew
then.’ Continuing, he noted that ‘radical politics was on many people’s minds, but for them
Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene.’
Given the domiance of realist painting during the 1930s, especially amongst those artists
associated with the political left, Greenberg’s recollection remains provocative. It affirms that
in the period leading up to the postwar apotheosis of an autonomous approach to abstraction
there existed a radical alternative, one that insisted on the political potential inherent in the
most advanced formal strategies. What’s more, in 1961, when Greenberg republished his
essay, he added a further parenthesis: ‘Some day it will have to be told how “anti-Stalinism,”
which started off more or less as “Trotskyism,” turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby
cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.’
This paper proposes to re-examine the debates around abstract painting and leftist politics
that unfolded during the late 1930s. By focussing on the writings of artists and critics in the
pages of publications such as Partisan Review, New Masses, and Art Front, the aim is not
only to demonstrate that the abstract art community was far more politically factional than
subsequent accounts suggest, but that American modernists occupied a sophisticated range
of positions on issues such as art as a form of cognition; the role of the artist in building a
new society; and the relevance of abstract form for developing a radical social and political
consciousness.
Julia Bailey (University College London) - The American Committee for
Cultural Freedom and the De-radicalisation of Art in 1950's America
This paper argues that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) played
a pivotal role in imposing anti-Communist ideology on the development of art in Cold War
America. Operating from 1951 to 1957, the organisation was predominantly under the
control of the formerly radical New York Intellectuals, who had developed an increasingly
anti-Communist leftist position during the 1930s and '40s. Under the leadership of executive
directors, Sol Stein and Irving Kristol, the group developed a number of initiatives to control
the display of painting and sculpture in the United States. In addition, the ACCF propagated
a negative rhetoric about Soviet art that affected the development of a national "American"
style of art in contrast to Socialist Realism. Influential cultural figures participating in these
activities included the New York museum directors, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (Museum of Modern
Art) and James Johnson Sweeney (Guggenheim Museum), as well as artists such as Robert
Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb.
The paper will take an interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, intellectual history
and Cold War revisionism, to explore how the American intellectual community influenced
US cultural policies in order to neutralise Soviet propaganda and what they perceived as
dangerous radical activities. The paper will further consider how art criticism and museum
display practices in 1950's America effectively co-opted artists operating in the United States
as agents for anti-Communist ideology.
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Dr. Raquel Franklin (Anáhuac University) - Of Art and Politics: Hannes
Meyer and the Workshop of Popular Graphics
In 1938 Hannes Meyer, former Director of the Bauhaus and one of the most radical
members of the architectural avant-garde, arrived in Mexico for the first time in order to
weigh the possibilities to immigrate to a country he considered “among the most progressive
democracies in the world”. A year later, he settled in Mexico City for the next ten years.
Meyer immediately assessed the political atmosphere among the Mexican left, especially
after being invited by the syndicalist leader Lombardo Toledano to the inauguration of the
CTAL (Latin-American Workers’ Confederation), who’s propaganda campaign was designed
by the newly founded Taller de la Gráfica Popular - TGP (Workshop of Popular Graphics).
Meyer collaborated with the workshop in different enterprises, first, as part of the German
exile in its struggle against fascism working as editor of The Black Book of Nazi Terror in
Europe and as designer of the Anti-fascist pavilion at the 1943 Book Fair, and later as an
active member, where he became an important ideological figure.
While in Mexico, Meyer confronted his political adversaries within the left. Being a Stalinist,
he was signaled by Diego Rivera as a Soviet Spy, was accused of participating in Trotsky’s
assassination and boycotted in his position as director of the Institute of Planning and
Urbanism by the Trotskyite Juan O’Gorman. He established long-lasting ties with the leaders
of the Italian exile, and helped in the absorption of intellectuals such as Anna Seghers and
Albe Steiner.
In the architectural field, the radical functionalism of his German period was abandoned to
evolve, after a six-year experience in the Soviet Union, into a more moderate approach. The
aim of this paper is to analyze the weight of ideology in Meyer’s fate, his influence and the
evolution of his artistic expressions both in his graphics and architecture.
Elisabeth Engel (Free University of Berlin) - Bourgeois Radicals?
Considerations on the Role of African-American Missionary Photography
and Film in the Early 20th Century
Perhaps no history has centered more on an “image” than that of African Americans
and Africa. This history, we are frequently told, was a radical one: African-American
movements in art, politics, and thought valorized Africa as a “usable past” and a “bright
future” to put into question notions of black inferiority. Notwithstanding the various values
black identity politics ascribed to images of Africa, all of them shared one characteristic. To
speak with a major scholar of African American relations to Africa, “very few American
Negroes since the Civil War had any face-to-face contact with Africans.”[1]
This paper focuses on the small and so far neglected group of African Americans that had
first-hand contact with Africa and as such might be understood as the actual core of a black
transnational history: missionaries. Since the early 1900s, African-American missionaries
were not only looking at the continent with evangelists‟ eyes, but through the lenses of
photography and cinematography. To document the work visually was important for, as one
missionary emphasized, “photography provides evidences that language (...) could never
supply.”[2] As such, missionary images of Africa were not meant to decorate private photo
albums; they circulated in magazines, travelogues, exhibitions, and film screenings. And they
publicly contested the romanticized view of Africa that fellow African Americans promoted.
By analyzing the production and uses of African images in missionary accounts, the
paper explores the role photography and film played in the context of the broad-scale African
American effort to remake and redefine images of Africa in the first half of the twentieth
century. The black church, I argue, was conservative in its values and organization, but
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radical in its means: The use of modern technologies of visualization precluded simplistic
visions of the continent and reinstated seeing as a category of knowing and authority within
the black political landscape. With this argument, the paper seeks to return attention to the
political center, or, more precisely, to how black middle class conservatives “returned the
gaze” on African-American radicalism.
[1] St. Clair Drake, “The American Negro and the African Interest.” In The American Negro Reference
Book. Edited by John P. Davis, Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
[2] L.L. Berry, “On Board of the „Queen Mary‟ in Mid-Atlantic,” Voice of Missions, April 1939, 4.
Panel 2C: Labour Activism in the Early Twentieth Century (IA
Rm105)
Dr. Michael Hall (University of Campinas) - Revolutionary Syndicalism in
Sao Paulo
In the early twentieth century, São Paulo became a relatively important center of
revolutionary syndicalism. Two of the major Italian leaders of this international
movement (Alceste De Ambris and Edmondo Rossoni) played an active role in the city,
and the largely immigrant working class proved to be fertile ground for radical
movements of various sorts. Workers confronted a hostile state that was tied to an
intransigent and cohesive bourgeoisie. Despite a number of highly unfavorable
circumstances, workers carried out several general (or at least generalized) strikes in the
city between 1906 and 1919. The urban union movement, though fragile, tended to
defend the tenants of revolutionary syndicalism, while practice proved less consistent.
(The role of syndicalism among immigrant coffee plantation workers is less clear).
Militants supported several varieties of direct action unionism, although such
distinctions never became as clearly institutionalized as they did in some other countries,
and affiliations in reality proved rather fluid. An oppressive state and the implausibility of
either effective political participation or reformist trade unionism served to reinforce the
general principles of revolutionary syndicalism. However, severe repression and the
emergence of the Communist Party weakened the movement considerably during the
1920s, although syndicalists retained the support of many organized workers into the
next decade, when the government of Getúlio Vargas effectively suppressed all radical
currents in the labor movement.
Based primarily on research in the Italian-language labor press of the period and
reports by Italian police and consular officials, the paper seeks to identify elements
specific to revolutionary syndicalism in São Paulo through comparison with other, betterknown cases, particularly in Argentina, Italy and the United States.
Dr. Vernon Pedersen (University of Great Falls) - George Hardy, George
Mink and the International Of Seamen and Harbor Workers: A Case of
the Failure of Transnational Radicalism
On 17 September 1935 the International of Seamen and Harbor Workers (ISH) sent a
report to its parent body, the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern), announcing that
plans to host an international conference of seafarers had collapsed for the second time and
would not be revived. A major cause of the implosion of the ISH came from the liquidation of
its member unions, in particular its largest and most successful the American based Marine
Workers Industrial Union (MWIU). On the surface the ISH should have been a rousing
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success. Mariners are, by the nature of their work lives, international and cosmopolitan in
outlook and have often adopted radicalism in response to their frequently dismal
circumstances. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebuagh suggest that seamen made up the
world’s first international working class and Rediker credits golden age pirates with crafting a
well-articulated radical response to 18th century shipboard life. The seamen of the 20th
century could be as assertive as their wooden hulled counterparts and the ISH had the
backing of a network of international revolutionary organizations making its failure all the
more remarkable. Study of the records of the ISH housed in the Comintern archives in
Moscow revel a number of reasons for the failure of the Profintern experiment. American
sailors led much more peripatetic lives than European ones and preferred a more anarchistic
radicalism focused on immediate goals rather than the disciplined revolutionary strategies
pursued by the ISH. A bureaucratic struggle raged between ISH head George Hardy and
MWIU head George Mink over distribution of scare international resources and Mink’s
divided loyalties caused by his “special work” for the OGPU, precursor of the KGB. Ironically
the worst blow to the ISH came when the Profintern, inspired by American successes,
ordered the liquidation of the ISH’s member unions.
Frank Wolff (Osnabrück University) - The Radical Roots of Jewish Life in
the Americas, 1890-1939
For decades scholars of Jewish history have emphasized the role of Jewish intellectuals
for the development of 20th century modernity and liberalism. Often the positive role Jews
played in modernist movements is directly connected to and explained by specific Jewish
traditions and experiences. But as David Roskies has emphasized, many of these studies
intended to “cast the revolutionary past into stone and elevate it to a new status”. This has
lead to critiques of Zionist history writing, but other narratives remain largely uncriticized. For
Jewish life in the Americas, only few and recent studies question the master narrative of
liberal intellectualism. They emphasize the importance of socialism and radical secularism
practiced by Jewish workers and migrants of all social strata. They reveal that many aspects
of later 20th century humanitarianism in fact root in the activism of strikers, union-organizers
and radical educators during the first half of the 20th century.
These studies, however, focus on specific unions, language associations, or political groups
in one nation or even city. They barely connect to recent transnational questions or
comparative perspectives and therefore marginalize the internationalist basis of left-wing
radicalism. In my recent work I am developing approaches to bridge this gap. Based on a
large corpus of Yiddish activists' literature as well as on archival sources from Eastern
Europe, the USA, Argentina and Israel this paper will draw a broader picture and first ask for
similarities of political activism of radical Jews in the Americas. Secondly, it will define
differences between important locations, in radical practices as well as in possibilities and
requirements for political activism. Finally I will demonstrate that the development of a selfconfident, modern, and secular Jewish diaspora roots in the anti-religious and socialist
radicalism of migrating East European Jewish workers. According to the different situations
they found in each country of immigration they used radical experiences from Eastern
Europe for their local struggles and then developed a broad bandwidth of cultural and
political programs in order to modernize Jewish life in the Americas.
10
Panel 3A: Venezuela in the Chavez Era (UCL WH)
Dr. Jeffery Webber (Queen Mary, University of London) - Red
Bureaucrats and Working-Class Radicals: The Competing Political
Economies of Venezuela under Chávez
Rooted in three periods of fieldwork in 2008, 2010, and 2012, this paper takes stock
of major developments in the political economy and dynamics of class struggle in
contemporary Venezuela after thirteen years under Hugo Chávez. It is argued that the
Bolivarian process has done a great deal to rejuvenate the international critique of
neoliberalism and to bring discussion of socialism back on the ideological agenda of the Left.
At the same time, there has clearly been no transition toward socialism in Venezuela, and
Chavismo is ridden with profound and abiding contradictions, some of which can be usefully
understood through the prism of Ernest Mandel’s Marxist theorization of bureaucracy, and
specifically its challenge to liberal, social democratic, and Stalinist theories of the same
phenomenon. Mandel’s theory of bureaucracy, it is argued, provides a more refined set of
analytical tools for understanding the state and the governing PSUV as a party, than the
more commonly employed autonomist conceptualization of “constituted power.” Temporally,
the paper grounds its discussion of bureaucratic containment by focusing on Chavez’ gradual
and partial radicalization between 2002 and 2007, and the subsequent contradictions of the
Venezuelan model in the context of the ongoing mutations in the global economic crisis since
2008 and the October 2012 elections.
Rachel Boothroyd (University of Liverpool) - Venezuelan Communes in
Construction: Transcending the Binary between Revolution and Reform
The passing of the Law of the Communes in 2010 marked a deepening of the
revolutionary process in Venezuela, which has given birth to the creation of various
mechanisms aimed at increasing both the political participation and protagonism of the
previously excluded subaltern classes. These mechanisms include communal councils,
urban land committees and workers' control councils, amongst others initiatives. A
substantial amount of academic literature has been dedicated to evaluating these various
instances of “popular power;” yet the predominant tendency has been to view them as
isolated projects isolated projects aimed at simply deepening the level of citizen political
participation as opposed to forming part of an overarching project to transform the liberal
State apparatus. Whilst some academic work has attempted an analysis of the Venezuelan
State, the overriding theoretical framework for these attempts tends to be based on the
Leninist notion of “dual power,” and focusses principally on the contradictions between
Negri's concept of the constituted power and the new forms of channelling the “constituent
power” that are being developed in Venezuela. This conceptualisation underestimates the
symbiotic relationship between what Michael Lebowitz has described as the coexistence of
two states which must “interact” within the process of constructing socialism and the
symbiotic relationship between current Venezuelan State structures and the revolutionary
popular movement. Through an evaluation of communes in construction in both urban and
rural Venezuela, this paper will explore the development of the communes, the process
through which they are transforming the State, their significance for understanding Statesociety relations in Venezuela and the possibilities that they represent for transcending the
binary of reform and revolution.
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Dr. Luis Duno-Gottberg (Rice University) - Panem et circus: Performing
Radical Popular Politics in Bolivarian Venezuela
What kind of revolutionaries are the clown and the juggler? Who?s the Ring Master of
that oil-rich-circus called Venezuela? These captious (and perhaps acrimonious) questions
suggest the challenges I face as I explore the political significance of affect for a collective of
circus performers in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution. In march 2008, all bullfighters
were expelled from one of the most emblematic bullrings of Venezuela. Their assailants, the
dangerous people that took over the historic space of matadores, were a group of clowns,
jugglers and aerialists. Thus, the Nuevo Circo de Caracas was in the hands of a ‘mob’ who
took over a patrimonial building to create the Nuevo Nuevo Circo de Caracas, a space for
political debate and cultural programming. The event might have come across as yet another
extravagant occurrence in the life of the capital city, but as I intend to show, it was a rather a
complex display of radical popular politics in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution.
I will explore the display of radical agency among these circus performers, as they navigate
Venezuelan politics, negotiating spaces of political action with the State. In short, I talk about
a group that is disqualified as pre-political because of the affective nature of it's practices, on
top of its close connections with a Chavista State (of which it becomes, supposedly,
subservient)
Panel 4A: The Early Cold War (UCL WH)
Diana Lemberg (Yale University) - Towards a Radical Historiography of
Human Rights: Modernizing Press and Speech Freedoms in the United
States, 1943-1950
This paper examines the modernization of press freedoms in the United States from
1943 to 1950. Emerging from a conflict that underscored the impact of media on mass
politics—and media’s susceptibility to state power—US liberals inside and outside
government sought to update liberalism to compete with the mass-cultural politics of fascism
and Stalinism. At the same time, they wanted to ensure US export markets after the war.
Modernized press and speech freedoms provided the discursive solution to the liberals’
dilemma: a transnational vector in which US self-interest would converge with that of a
worldwide public. “[We] have an enlightened but selfish interest in the extension of [freedom
of expression] to the rest of the world,” opined an emblematic 1944 editorial. “Let’s tincture
our idealism with the frank argument that more freedom of expression can mean less taxes,
less armaments and less bloodshed.” As European markets reopened to US exports, diverse
US American culture-brokers blurbed catchphrases like “freedom of information,” “freedom of
the screen,” and “freedom to listen and to look”; and publicized them in articles,
advertisements, broadcasts, and speeches—all as alternatives to European imperialism.
The paper challenges human-rights scholarship that argues human rights played an
insignificant role internationally during the 1940s because liberalism had not yet been
disentangled from European empires. This argument, which hews to traditional methods in
intellectual and political history, minimizes the expansionist thrust of (nominally) anti-imperial
US liberalism during the 1940s and beyond. By extending radical scholarship on US empire
to postwar human rights, my paper illuminates the interplay between liberalism, US economic
and cultural expansionism, and human-rights discourses. I will take a radical approach to
human-rights historiography that engages with the idea, broached in theory and other
branches of historiography, that the category of “empire” is not limited to territorial conquest.
Dr. Nicholas Grant (University of East Anglia) - Paul Robeson: Race,
Radicalism and Patriotism in the Early Cold War
During the early Cold War the U.S. government attempted to systematically dismantle
the radical African American left. The vehement anticommunism of the day led to the
12
censorship, arrest, detention and deportation of a number of black radicals who overtly
attacked race discrimination as well as the imperialist foreign policy of the United States.
Paul Robeson, the globally famous actor, singer and activist, was deliberately targeted by the
American authorities throughout this period. His ties with communist organisers and work
with organisations such as the Council on African Affairs and the Civil Rights Congress
ensured his ‘subversive ‘status in the United States. In addition to this, his widely misquoted
comments at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference, which seemed to imply that African
Americans would side with the Soviet Union in any future global war between the two
superpowers, sparked riots at home and prompted the State Department to revoke his
passport.
The purpose of this paper is to explore Robeson’s radical political thought within the context
of the early Cold War. Whilst Robeson has often been seen as a cosmopolitan figure, whose
political influence cannot be solely confined to the United States, I will focus on the effect his
identity as an American citizen had on his radical politics. As a global figure Robeson was at
the forefront of a number of transnational campaigns for racial justice, however he also
simultaneously embraced his identity as patriotic American. By analysing his political
writings, speeches and performances, I will argue that Robeson was able to construct an
alternative vision of American nationalism. Often employing highly gendered language in
order to question what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, he radically reinterpreted
the restrictive nature of American nationalism – challenging repressive anticommunist ideas
by rhetorically reconstructing the United States as an open, democratic and multi-racial
entity. I hope that an analysis of how this was achieved would not only provide a new
perspective on Robeson’s own political thought, but will also contribute to our understanding
of the relationship between patriotism and African American radicalism.
Steve Cushion (University College London) - Cold War Murder and the
Employers Productivity Offensive
In order to gain popular support for its war against Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy, the US government encouraged reforming regimes in Latin America which
introduced popular welfare measures and granted workers the right to organise.
However, following the defeat of the Axis powers, the USA looked for ways to reverse
the wartime reforms and to restore profitability in the difficult post-war economic
circumstances. Anti-communist hysteria was used to cover a generalised attack on
working class living standards,providing cover for the victimisation of militant shop
stewards and union officials, irrespective of their politics.
This paper will argue that, in the case of Cuba, this victimisation went as far as murder in
the purge of communists and other militants from the trade union federation, the CTC.
However, it will also be argued that this purge failed to deliver the intended increase in
workers' productivity, leading the employers to support the brutal Batista dictatorship
which followed.
Mark Seddon (University of Sheffield) - Responding to Radicalism: The
USA and Venezuela, 1945-1948
The Cold War reoriented the US Government’s perception of social democratic
governments and economic nationalism within Latin America, and placed new emphasis on
the US Government’s relationship with its southern neighbours. By examining US relations
with Venezuela between 1945 and 1948, this paper analyses the evolution of US attitudes
towards Latin American radicalism.
As the Second World War drew to a close, Venezuela was a vital source of oil for the USA.
However, this was potentially placed in jeopardy when, in 1945, the leftist Acción
Democrática party seized power. Significantly, the US Government was fully prepared to
recognise the new Venezuelan Government. Thus, in the immediate years following the end
of the Second World War, the US Government showed a willingness to take a relatively
13
nuanced approach to a leftist government in Venezuela. This was in contrast to the stark bipolar perspective that would come to form US Cold War policy in Latin America. Indeed, by
1948, the US Government was showing concern regarding the Venezuelan leadership’s
possible communist sympathies as well as its ability, and willingness, to safeguard US oil
companies’ interests. When, in 1948, the AD Government was toppled by a military coup, the
US Government was content to recognise the military Junta that seized power.
This paper provides a case study of the way in which the Cold War’s geopolitical framework
profoundly affected US attitudes towards Latin American radicalism. Fear of communist
infiltration into Latin America led the US Government to abandon its policy of cooperation in
the region, as ‘containment’ became central to US foreign policy. Indeed, US attitudes
towards the region can be seen as emblematic of the wider foreign policy objectives of the
US Government during this period.
Panel 4B: Rethinking Black Power (IA Rm 103)
Say Burgin (University of Leeds) - Transformative Teaching: Black
Power, White People and (Mis)Education
As Black Power took hold of the U.S. in the late 1960s, racial justice organising
shifted for those whites who had been engaged in the black freedom movement. Told that
they should be fighting racism where it ‘is most manifest’ – in white communities – those
whites who stayed connected to the cause found a number of outlets: Students for a
Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, prisoner solidarity groups and communitybased organisations. While recent scholarship has begun to turn its attention towards whites’
ongoing racial justice activities, one of the most radical and widespread of these efforts is
consistently overlooked: anti-racism workshops. Increasingly prevalent from the late 1960s
through to the diversity-trainings explosion of the 1990s, this paper demonstrates that these
workshops had their roots in the black freedom, women’s liberation and gay liberation
movements. Activists from these movements led these workshops, usually under the
auspices of a free school or grassroots group, in order to examine white racial domination
and privilege within both leftist social movements and larger U.S. society.
With reference to workshops that took place at the feminist free school Breakaway in San
Francisco in the early 1970s, I explore the foundational assumptions of anti-racism
workshops. This paper seeks to explain how and why these efforts sought to frame race and
racism as issues of knowledge and consciousness and why such efforts constituted radical
praxis. I argue that early anti-racism workshops were pedagogical projects that sought to
confront the racial ignorance(s) that structured the lives of whites in the U.S., including
progressives and their liberation movements. Sometimes criticised for failing to produce
direct changes in racist systems or institutions, I maintain that the efficacy and the power of
these workshops laid in their epistemological effects, the transformations they brought about
in whites’ understanding, or awareness, of racial realities.
Kerry Flett (University of St. Andrews) - 'Re-evaluating Black Panther
Party sources on survival programs, 1967-76'
Often, historical analyses of the Black Panther Party have fallen prey to partiality,
becoming either explicit criticism or elegy. More recent works by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru
Williams have put forward a new approach, looking into the party’s survival programs at a
local level. This paper situates itself within this methodology, arguing that the party’s sources
on the subject provide a basis for a deeper understanding of the BPP outside old ideological
14
boundaries. The elements of Panther symbolism and visual culture present in many of these
sources appear to validate earlier judgements on the Panthers as a militant threat to law and
order, but there is much more to be gained from these documents. Survival programs such
as the Free Breakfast for Children and Free Food initiatives existed less to convert people to
the Ten-Point Program than to fulfil their basic needs. Health programs served to raise the
political consciousness of the community at large by making services such as hospitals and
ambulances available for free, thus highlighting the disparity between what people could
afford and what the private sector offered. The Sickle Cell Anaemia testing programme was
particularly well received, having been mentioned by Nixon in his Special Message to
Congress in March 1972, and provides a neat contrast to established criticisms of the party
as a fringe group. The Oakland Community School, the party’s flagship project, also allows
us to find another motivation for the BPP’s programmes; the teaching and empowerment of
the wider community was a key plank of party doctrine. New scholarship thus benefits from
the fact that survival program sources show us a BPP with ambitions more intricate than
simple violence.
Dr. Michael Foley (University of Sheffield) - Black Power Jazz: Rahsaan
Roland Kirk, the Jazz & People’s Movement, and the Politics of ‘Black
ClassicalMusic’
In recent years, cultural historians have begun to re-think the place of jazz in American
life, emphasizing its role as a vehicle for spreading American culture and values abroad including State Department-funded trips by jazz "jambassadors" around the globe - and as a
vehicle for dissent at home - seeing it as an important civil rights movement art form.
Surprisingly, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, is all but
absent in these studies. Although Kirk never attained the status of Miles Davis or John
Coltrane, he was a major figure in American jazz in the 1960s and 1970s and, perhaps most
important, was an outspoken political artist. Kirk not only recorded albums with politically
tinged titles such as "Volunteered Slavery," "Blacknuss," and "Natural Black Inventions: Root
Strata," but he likewise spoke frequently from the stage about the repression of black artists
and the ignorance of both white and black Americans about the African-American heritage of
jazz. In 1969 and 1970, Kirk led dozens of professional jazz musicians - including Charles
Mingus, Lee Morgan, and Archie Shepp - in a series of sit-ins and disruptions of network
television talk shows, to protest the almost total absence of black musicians on television; he
called this radical rag-tag army of musical anarchists the Jazz & People’s Movement.
In this paper, I will argue that Rahsaan Roland Kirk was the quintessential Black Power artist.
Kirk was the foremost "memory entrepeneur" of jazz, a relentless evangelist for the beauty,
value, and history of what he called "black classical music."
Dr. Amzat Boukari Yabara (EHESS, Paris) - History, Radical Creativity
and Social Struggles in the Caribbean
Based on the experience of the Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney
(1942-1980), this communication emphasizes the connections between history, radical
creativity and social struggles in the Caribbean. In 1968, Walter Rodney spent nine months
lecturing in Jamaica until he was banned from the country by the authorities because of his
social and political activism with groups of Rastafari, Garveyists, pro-Cuban and Black Power
activists. His ban from Jamaica was followed with troubles known as the “Rodney riots”,
which gave birth to a new culture of radicalism in the Caribbean. In 1974, after he spent five
years teaching history in Tanzania, Rodney returned to Guyana. However, his academic
appointment at the University of Guyana was cancelled by the government, once more
because of his political opinions. Despite the mobilization and the overseas professional
offers, Rodney decided to stay in Guyana, to research on local history, and to engage
politically against the regime until his brutal and untimely death in June 1980. Focusing on
15
these circumstances of Rodney’s life, this paper has two goals. First is to highlight the
connections between Rodney’s riots, Black Power, and the 1968 World Revolution in the
making of a radical Caribbean culture. Second is to look closely at the last years of Rodney’s
life so as to define the criteria which turns a scholar in a true radical. Located outside of the
mainstream academia, Rodney crystallized the committed social scholar trying not only to
describe the society but to transform it. The conclusion may evaluate the contemporary
impact of Rodney’s thoughts and actions in the radicalization of Caribbean and south
American social movements in the twenty first century.
Panel 4C: Latin America's Radical Grassroots: Workers, Peasants
and Shantytowns (IA Rm 105)
Anna Cant (University of Cambridge) - Competing Radicalisms and the
Peruvian Agrarian Reform, 1968-75
The left-wing military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-75) differed in
major respects from Peru’s previous military regimes. It was characterised by collective
decision-making rather than the leadership of a single caudillo, and it implemented a series
of radical reforms. The most significant of these was the Agrarian Reform Law, which
expropriated large areas of land and redistributed it to the peasantry through a system of
agrarian cooperatives. Declaring itself in opposition to the oligarchy and global imperialism,
the self-titled Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces called for popular participation
and collaborated closely with left-wing intellectuals and political activists. Yet the Velasco
government was also subject to fierce criticism from leftist political parties, which condemned
the so-called ‘Revolution’ as bourgeois and reformist. In this paper I examine the often
strained relationship between the Velasco government and the Left, and the rival radicalisms
that emerged during the process of agrarian reform. I discuss three key points of political
controversy: the agrarian debt (radical leftists rejected the idea of financial compensation for
expropriated hacendados and latifundistas); the role of the trade unions in the context of
cooperative ownership; and, modes of political organisation at a national level (the
government’s strategies for social mobilisation were rejected as corporatist and
disempowering, while the government in turn accused political parties of being self-serving
and manipulative). Disagreement on these issues sparked controversy both between the Left
and the government, and within the Left, which became ever more internally divided.
Drawing on contemporary magazines and newspapers, as well as recently conducted
interviews, I explore the evolving political discourse of the period, in which competing political
agents defined themselves as the ‘true’ bearers of the Revolution.
Adriana Massidda (University of Cambridge) - Radical Urbanism in
Buenos Aires Shantytowns: the Emergence and Work of the Federación
de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia (Buenos Aires, 1958-1966)
In 1958, as a reaction to the eviction plan that the Argentine government was already
putting into practice (Plan de Emergencia), the shantytown residents of Greater Buenos
Aires created a federation to protect their rights. This federation would be called Federación
de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia (FVBE; Federation of Shantytowns and Emergency
Neighbourhoods), and would encompass local groups and neighbourhood committees that
had been emerging in specific shantytowns throughout the previous years. Although some
shantytowns counted with more organised committees than others, the FVBE aimed to
represent them all and formalised claims that concerned them. It became thus, in the early
1960s, the main instrument of dialogue and negotiation between the state and the residents.
Encouraged and backed by the Communist Party, the FVBE represented a radical way of
struggle for the preservation and the improvement of workers and poor urban residents
housing. Over time, it would be banned by the 1966-1972 dictatorship, it would re-emerge in
16
the early 1970s with a distinct Peronist profile, merging into the Movimiento Peronista Villero,
and would be eventually ravaged by the 1976-1983 dictatorship. After a brief account of the
historical context and the antecedents, this paper will concentrate on the early years of the
FVBE to analyse its emergence, its approach to the shantytowns and dwelling problems, and
the material and organisational achievements.
Adam Fishwick (University of Sussex) - Clasismo: Rethinking Radical
Working Class Politics in 20th Century Argentina
The emergence of the Peronist labour movement during the mid-twentieth century
has dominated our understanding of working class radicalism in Argentina. Yet whilst the
importance of Peronism cannot be underplayed, recent historical work in Argentine labour
history has emphasised the persistence of alternative political groups within the workers’
movement (Schneider 2005; Schiavi 2009; Basualdo 2010). The aim of this paper is to
explore the clasista movements that emerged in the tumult of the 1970s as the most
concerted challenge to the hegemony of Peronism and locate these in the history of the
workers’ struggles in Argentina. The main examples that will be considered are the SITRACSITRAM union in Córdoba, the CGTA labour federation, and the SMATA mechanical
workers’ union led by René Salamanca. It will be argued that whilst these autonomous,
socialist and revolutionary movements were unique in the political conflicts through which
they emerged, they should also be located in the context of labour militancy that persisted
throughout the mid-twentieth century. In factories and workplaces across the country, nonPeronist working class political activists played an important role in the most combative
labour conflicts alongside the Peronist majority. By the late 1960s political tensions had
increased under the military dictatorship of the Revolución Argentina and in the early 1970s
with the Peronist leadership that attempted to reassert control over the workers’ movement.
Tensions in the workplace also increased, as attempts to rationalise production and increase
productivity across the economy led to an intensification of workplace grievances. It will be
shown that whilst this context gave salience to the clasista movement, it was not an anomaly
in the 20th century history of Argentina’s labour movement. Instead it was the culmination of
a combative radicalism that contested the political hegemony of Peronism and the trajectory
of economic development.
Lauren Collins (University of Nottingham) - The Consejos Populares in
1990s Cuba
Emerging from an initiative by Municipal delegates of the Organs of Peoples’
Power (OPP) in the late 1980s, the Consejos Populares were established throughout
Cuba in early 1990s. They facilitated local problem solving outside of the vertical
structures of the OPP, the mass organisations and the bureaucracy. The role that
popular participation may have played in Cuba’s failure to make the expected transition
to capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union has tended to be overlooked. This
paper reflects on the extent to which the Consejos Populares provided local
neighbourhoods with new ways to deal with the crisis of the Special Period, and asks
whether extending opportunities for popular participation played a role in maintaining the
legitimacy of the revolutionary government.
17
Panel 5A: Roots of Radicalism (UCL WH)
Dr. Michael Collins (University of Nottingham) - “Pure Feelings, Noble
Aspirations, and Generous Ideas”: José Martí, Charles Anderson Dana
and New York Print Culture
During the 1880s two major New York publications (the leading daily newspaper The
New York Sun and the weekly literary magazine The Hour) solicited over three hundred
English-language articles on cultural and political topics from the exiled poet and future
leader of the Cuban independence movement José Martí. Both publications were edited and
controlled by Martí’s “warm friend” the former Brook Farm transcendentalist Charles
Anderson Dana. As Janet Steele has commented, Dana’s commitments to intellectual
independence, resistance to advertising, and high literary standards have often led to “the
neglect of…. Dana’s New York Sun” and The Hour in histories of Gilded Age journalism,
which (since Vernon Parrington’s influential Main Currents in American Thought) have
tended to focus on the rise of the more populist “yellow journalism” of W.R. Hearst’s Journal
and Joseph Pulitzer’s World.
In this paper, I argue that a general neglect of Martí’s work within Anglophone American
Studies is intimately connected with the critical fate of Charles Anderson Dana. Furthermore,
I show how the influence of post-Revolutionary Cuban Marxist historiography on readings of
Martí’s work have led to a picture of the writer as an alienated outsider within Anglophone
literary culture that does not adequately capture either his popularity or his influence on New
York print culture in the Gilded Age. In so doing, I resurrect Martí as a voice that worked
from within the New York scene and consider how his radical, Pan-Americanist thought and
innovative literary style both reflected, and helped to shape, the character of Charles
Anderson Dana’s wider journalistic project. In particular, I show how Martí’s thought on the
importance of access to high culture and radical social commitments chimed with Dana’s
own utopian vision of “a republic of autonomous producers united in a cooperative
commonwealth” (Steele, 5) that he called “producerism” and espoused in the pages of The
Sun and The Hour.
Edward Blumenthal (Paris VII Denis Diderot) - Exile and the Radical
Imagination in Argentina and Chile (1830-60)
Exile, and more generally mobility and circulation, have recently begun to receive
more attention from scholars for their roles in state and nation building in Latin America. Here
I will examine mid 19th-century Chilean and Argentinian exiles to examine how the
experience of political migration informed these exiles’ radicalism. Promoters of liberalism
and democratic nationalism in Southern Cone countries often faced exile. Indeed, for many,
the experience of being expelled from their native land was one constituting element of their
radicalism, forcing them to live apart from the societies they critiqued and sought to reform.
Furthermore, exile played an important role in these figures finding their voices as social and
political critics of both the country they left behind as well as their adopted host countries.
Living and traveling in neighboring countries as well as Europe afforded exiles the
opportunity to observe other nation-building projects, the geographic distance facilitating
comparisons with political developments at home. It also gave exiles the opportunity to push
for change at home through both “regime change” and their writings. The line of causation
was not unidirectional however. For Argentinian exiles such as Sarmiento, Alberdi and
Gutierrez, the experience of exile affected the intellectual maturation of their political projects
and was to have a moderating influence on their advocacy of democracy as a political
system. For Chileans such as Vicuña Mackenna and Barros Arana, exile represented an
opportunity to rethink the role of their country in the region and the world. Finally, for the most
radical of the mid-19th century democratic nationalists such as F Bilbao, their internationalist
18
radicalism expressed itself most fully in exile and as an association between their political
beliefs and the reality of political migration. Fundamentally, exile and radicalism played a
mutually reinforcing role in shaping their liberal nation-building projects.
Nicholas Miller (University of Potsdam) - The Radical Inca
Like their North American counterparts the Aztecs, the Incas quickly
found their efficient imperial bureaucratic system to be the enabler
of a swift demise by a rag-tag team of Spanish conquistadores. When
conquest gave way to historical inquiry, the task became to describe
what had since been lost. Garcilaso de la Vega in the sixteenth
century offered a reading that reflected his mixed cultural
background; he was on the one hand descended from Inca royalty, and
the other hand versed in the writings of classical antiquity, above
all Plato. His treatise on the question of Inca structures emphasised
its collectivism: including collective granaries, frequent
redistribution of property according to the needs of each family, and
the intensive surveillance of family life.
Immediately contentious, the question of the exact character of Inca
communalism remained live into the eighteenth century, before
acquiring a particular new ideological saliency around the turn of the
nineteenth, not only with the rise of utopian socialism, but also with
South American searching for a historical past that could guide the
way to a future beyond Spanish dominion. In South America, La Vega
provided the ideological fire for the Túpac Amaru rebellion in late
eighteenth century Peru and nineteenth-century “revolutionaries” such
as Francisco de Miranda (Venezeula) and Manuel Belgrano (Argentina)
called for hemispherical unions to be ruled by a King known as the
Inca. A little later, American Fourierists continued in the direction
that Morelly and the physiocrats had developed in the mid-eighteenth
century, deploying notions of Inca communalism to buttress proposals
for a revisioning of structures of social support. In this paper, I
would like to consider the Atlantic dimensions of this discussion in
the nineteenth century, showing how North American, South American,
and European thinkers played with a specific type of historical
characterisation and memory in order to develop a range of radical
propositions.
Dr. Daniel Nagel (University of Mannheim) - Divided by Radicalism:
German Communist and Republican Forty Eighters in the United States,
1850-1865
The Forty-Eighters, the German revolutionaries who went into exile following the failed
revolution of 1848/49 can be divided into two major groups: republicans and communists.
Both groups faced very similar challenges after their arrival in the United States, but they
responded very differently. However historians have rarely compared their political ideology.
They have also neglected to place the communist Forty-Eighters in the US-American setting
of
the
1850s.
The republican Forty-Eighters were convinced that only the overthrow of monarchical rule
and the establishment of republican government enabled European countries to proceed on
19
a path of progress and prosperity. They considered the United States to be a model of 19th
century republicanism, but feared that slavery would eventually destroy this exemplary
republic. In their opinion, it was up to the people and their representatives to enact the
necessary reforms. They also envisioned a special role for German immigrants who had to
use their “German virtues” to save the republican government of the United States.
The communist Forty-Eighters instead focused on spreading their respective brand of
communism in the United States. Their efforts were marred by deep divisions between
Wilhelm Weitling and the disciples of Karl Marx, Joseph Weydemeyer and Adolph Cluss.
Both groups were convinced that another revolution was necessary to create a “republic of
workers” (Weitling) or a “classless society” (Marx), but fought over whose ideology was the
better
suited
to
achieve
this
goal.
The communists faced unremitting attacks by the republican Forty-Eighters who accused
them of neglecting the threat posed by slavery and attempting to create a communist
dictatorship by destroying freedom and private property, both essential components of
republicanism.
The resulting conflict shaped the political attitudes of German-Americans during the 1850s.
The republican Forty-Eighters prevailed and used their newly created concept of a “German
mission” in the United States to fight slavery as members of newly founded Republican
Party. My paper aims to show how and why republicanism was better suited to the political,
economic and social conditions of the 1850s than communism.
Panel 5B: Performance and Practice (IA Rm103)
Larne Abse Gogarty (University College London) - Women’s Work and
Radical Dance
In this paper I will explore how the radical dance pedagogy of Edith Segal during the
1920s-30s represented a step away from the normative gender roles of stoic mothers and
brawny workers associated with much leftist culture during the period. As compared to
radical practices in the visual arts and theatre, the proletarian dance scene was dominated
by women, to the point where Gene Martel, writing in a June 1935 edition of New Theatre
wrote a piece under the headline of ‘Men Must Dance!’, bemoaning the lack of male
participation and presence.
Within this paper I will discuss Segal’s dance Black and White, which she performed with
African-American dancer Alison Burroughs in 1930 at the Second Annual Interracial Dance
at the Rockland Palace in New York City. In addition, I will discuss Segal’s work in
establishing and coordinating the amateur Dance Group of the Needle Trades Workers
Industrial Union. As Bella Hurst, secretary of the group noted, dancing within Segal’s
workshop utilised needle worker’s daily struggles as thematic material for dance, and in turn
dance became a way to help workers understand and fight against poor labour conditions.
Within this, physical movement was conceived of as an emancipatory method to create
communal and revolutionary social experiences.
I will analyse these performances as a specifically female form of creative labour in relation
to the contemporaneous theories of Mary Inman, a feminist Communist Party USA member
who argued in her 1940 tract, In Women’s Defence, that housework should be considered as
essential to the continued hegemony of capitalism. Inman’s development of a theory of
reproductive labour has been much neglected in contemporary discussions of the subject. By
historicising this text in relation to a form of creative labour which sought to reproduce
dancers and militant culture through amateur workers groups, I will illuminate a lesser told
story about radical culture and the work of women during the 1930s-1940s in the USA.
20
Dr. Julia Roth (Free University of Berlin) - “Decolonial, Transnational,
Queer: The Radical Musical Practices of Las Krudas Cubensis and the
Kumbia Queers”
Queer feminist bands from the Americas have recently become more visible
appropriating traditionally male and (hetero‐)sexist genres. The Mexican‐Argentinean
all‐girls‐group Kumbia Queers in their “tropipunk” version claim and implicitly challenge the
traditional speaking position of Kumbia by inscribing heretofore silenced and tabooed
non‐heteronormative forms of desires to it and ridiculing the masculinist macho sexism
typical for the genre (e.g. in their songs “Chica de calendario”, in which they perform as auto
mechanics adoring the girl of the calendar at the workshop wall or “La isla con chicas”, a
queer remake of Madonna’s “La isla bonita”). The Kumbia Queers hence also break with the
stereotype of backward Latin American gender politics. The Black Cuban Queer Feminist Hip
Hop band Las Krudas Cubensi goes even a step further than taking the position traditionally
denied to them, as their texts and performances address and implicitly seek to fight multiple
forms of oppression and the related binaries and hierarchies such as sexism, racism,
heteronormativity and homophobia. By situating these oppressions as inherent to the logic of
western capitalism and colonial legacies, Las Krudas not only capture and appropriate the
traditional male and (homo‐ )sexist genre of Hip Hop for their empowerment, agency and
cultural critique, but also implicitly perform a ‘intersectional’ and transnational decolonial
feminist practice and politics they have coined “New Caribbean Feminism”. Since they have
by now migrated to the United States, Las Krudas moreover incorporate a Queer Cuban
Diaspora position, creating a heterotopic transgressive music which “expands diasporic
space, transgresses geographic borders and links sound to place: La Habana (...) and
fashioning a musical aesthetic that allows for the articulation of the local as well as the
global.” (Armstead 2008)
This Paper analyses lyrics and interviews by the Kumbia Queers and Las
Krudas (and other feminist Hip Hop bands) reading them as performances of a radical
transnational queer feminism, based on solidarity and alliances. It asks especially in how far
radical politics as performed by Las Krudas – embedded in and devoted to an implicit critique
of capitalism (as claimed by Mohanty) and coloniality (as proposed by Lugones) – seemingly
takes feminism back to its radically political roots as expressed e.g. by the Combahee River
Collective Statement, thus challenging and re‐negotiating theorizations such as the ones
coined under problematic conceptualizations such as “intersectionality” celebrated by
hegemonic feminist discourses (which are often de‐linked from feminist‐ activist practices).
How do their queer and Afro‐feminist practices functions as a response to and negotiation of
the Eurocentric visions imposed by the canon of contemporary feminist thinking as well as
hegemonic notions of occidental gender stereotypes related to the Americas?
Dr. Holly Gale Millette (University of Southampton) - Radicals in the
Renaissance: The Williams & Walker Performance Collective, a
Transatlantic Epigraph to Black Power?
In October of 1903 the Williams & Walker touring collective opened at the
Shaftesbury Theatre in London in its acclaimed performance of In Dahomey. In Dahomey
was the most economically and critically successful of all the turn of the century black
theatricals. Its success does not entirely chime with its content: the show was entirely
anchored by the ‘Uplift’ of a race, the subversion of imperialism, and diasporic identities
seeking legitimate power. To succeed, the politically active cast engaged in a doubleconsciousness of presentation to ‘sell’ the show. Its main plot was the repatriation and
reclamation of an African Kingdom by a pair of ex-enslaved African Americans. The pair,
played by George Walker and Bert Williams, had met while suffering through the pain of
performing as ‘authentic Africans’ in various colonial displays and exhibitions in the West of
21
America. This paper discusses the Williams and Walker performance collective, their tour of
England and their show In Dahomey, and speculates on their engagement with European
and American radicals of their time. My thoughts are that personal pain led them to act
collectively to subvert popular entertainment in a two-way cathartic dance of resistance. In
this, the stage was very much a mediated cultural contact zone between radical performers
and liberal spectators. The Company’s success placed them, on their return, at the pinnacle
of Harlem Renaissance’s elite, a group of people and an epoch that burnt fast and died
young. However, the strides they made toward radicalising their brethren and uplifting their
race were quite long ones. I see their story as an epigram to the narrative of their race’s
politicisation and expressions of Black Power later in the century.
Dr. Kate Dossett (University of Leeds) - “Our Actors May Become our
Emancipators”: Realism, Living Newspapers and Radical Black Theatre
in 1930s America
When Jules Bledsoe attempted to perform the role of the Emperor Jones before black
audiences at the Lincoln Theatre they called for the Emperor to “come on out o’ that jungleback to Harlem where you belong.”[1] Harlem’s black audience that night was hardly the first
to feel estranged from the portrait of black life presented on an American stage. Used to
racist caricature or black characters who existed only in relation to white heroes, African
Americans frequently adapted, interjected and revised the meaning of American dramas.
Estrangement was central to debates about radical theatre in the 1930s. For most white
radical theatre practitioners in the 1930s estrangement was a prerequisite for politically
useful drama. Realist drama, they feared provoked empathy and identification with the
characters, exciting such immediate passion in its audience that it served a cathartic rather
than revolutionary function. By contrast, they believed that the agit-propaganda plays of the
late 1920s American workers theatre, and the European experiments of Brecht and Piscator
had shown that a non-illusionary theatre allowed the emotional detachment, reasoned
argument, and estrangement necessary to the development of a revolutionary and politically
efficacious theatre. If realist theatre was a bourgeois conceit that reinforced the status quo,
non-realist theatre would engage the masses and bring the revolution closer. This paper
explores how black Americans used the Living Newspaper to challenge these notions of
what constituted radical form and a radical political theatre in 1930s America. The Living
Newspaper was a documentary drama of contemporary affairs, inspired by the Russian and
German worker’s theatre, and regarded as an important innovation in 1930s non-realist
American theatre for its experimentation with cinematic devices, episodic format and nonillusionary staging. Through its satirical treatment of form and content, the black Living
Newspaper questioned whether any American theatre could be radical, presaging the
debates which would shape the black arts movement thirty years later. Though it adopted a
non-realist format, the black Living Newspaper also offered a powerful defence of “black
realism” as a site of liberation and freedom from white distortions of black life, a space of
safety in which black humanity could be affirmed and past struggles could serve as
inspiration for a better future.
22
Panel 6A: Radical Contradictions: Opposing and Reappropriating
Radicalisms (UCL WH)
Dr. Simon Hall (University of Leeds) - A “Red, White and Blue Left”:
American Radicals and Patriotic Protest during the 1970s
This paper focuses on the People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), an offshoot of
the 1960s activist milieu, which promoted a radical anti-corporate agenda during the 1970s.
The PBC agreed with those who charged that the New Left had alienated the majority of
ordinary Americans by embracing ‘anti-American’ forms of protest. Viewing the
abandonment of patriotic symbols and rhetoric as a strategic disaster, the PBC linked their
own radical demands to the “most noble and revolutionary principles of our common
heritage” in order to “challenge existing institutions and those in power.” It hoped to forge a
“Red, White and Blue Left” that would bring about a fundamental redistribution of economic
power in the United States.
Patriotism infused the PBC’s approach: they invoked Sam Adams, Tom Paine, and
the Boston artisans, denounced corporations such as Exxon and ITT as the modern-day
equivalents of King George III, and issued their own ‘Declaration of Economic
Independence’. Inspired by the upcoming Bicentennial of the American Revolution, they
embraced street theatre – staging colourful re-enactments of the Boston Tea Party and
missing no opportunity to wear tricorner hats and powdered wigs.
During the 1970s, gay rights activists dressed as the founding fathers, feminists
invoking the Declaration of Independence, and air traffic controller union organizers waving
revolutionary-era ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags, were among those who joined PBC activists in
their use of Americanism. The recent emergence of the Tea Party movement has reenforced prevailing interpretations that see patriotism as the preserve of the political right.
The history of the PBC provides a fascinating window onto a vibrant yet understudied
tradition of radical Left patriotism in the post-1960s United States.
Bart Verhoeven (University of Nottingham) - The John Birch Society
In the face of the recent congressional fiscal gridlock, soaring public debt, Tea Party
versus Occupy activism and the raging Republican primaries, the historians among us tend
to look backwards in an attempt to discern patterns that may explain the present and suggest
answers for the future. In this vein, I would like to look at the role of the anticommunist,
conspiratorial John Birch Society, which is also the theme of my doctoral thesis, in
perpetuating – or rather resuscitating – the anti-New Deal legacy of the American Liberty
League, McCarthyism, Taft-Hartley right-to-work legislation etc. In a similar approach to the
research performed by Elizabeth Tandy Schermer, Kim Phillips-Fein and Elizabeth FonesWolf, I am focusing on how certain long-standing forces within the American business
community helped mobilize resources and manpower to tarnish the liberal “establishment” in
a wider effort to revolt against liberalism and roll back the public spending initiatives,
progressive tax rates and internationalist policies of the Roosevelt era in post-war America.
Responding to eight years of “modern Republicanism” under Eisenhower, Robert Welch and
his Bircher allies anticipate the later rift within the GOP on spending and foreign policy, and
help us nuance the image of the “lunatic fringe” Radical Right that fully emerged in the 1960s
and helped nominate, if not elect, Barry Goldwater in 1964. In short, I’m sketching a basic
historiography of Welch’s life and the business networks that led him towards breaking with
Republican politics and mobilizing the far right in an age of Cold War liberalism.
23
Dr. George Lewis (University of Leicester) - Inherited or Inculcated?
Radicalism, Counter-Radicalism, and The American Legion, 1919-1940.
From its founding in the aftermath of the Great War until the outbreak of World War II,
The American Legion transformed itself from an organization fighting for veterans’ rights into
the largest and most energetic anti-radical organisation in the United States. Positioning itself
as a curator of “100% Americanism,” The Legion’s central hierarchy and million-strong
membership amplified the inter-war radical threat, before devising a series of programmes
and activities that sought to protect that 100% Americanism by destroying un-American
radicalism. Those anti-radical activities ranged from nation-wide educational initiatives (both
formal school-based programmes and informal speakers’ tours) to reams of publications
(from the formal American Legion magazine and books to the more populist Huddle), youth
programmes and political lobbying driven by the significant number of Legionnaires in state
and federal government.
The Legion was a private “patriotic” group, but nonetheless managed to shape the
contemporary public understanding of radicalism, successfully promoting a subjective and
internally contested definition of radicalism as an objective, clearly-defined truth.
Nonetheless, little is known about its internal machinations and anti-radical programmes, not
least because its archival holdings remain private. This paper will draw upon rare access to
those archives to examine internal documents, including letters, resolutions, pamphlets,
minutes and memorandums to analyse its views on contemporary radicalism. In particular, it
will examine internal organizational debates that were often fractious, despite the continued
promotion of a harmonious external façade, not least over the question of whether radicalism
was heritable or learned. That distinction was vital to broader understandings of the
perceived radical threat to America and to Americanism, and equally to the character and
tenor of contemporary counter-radical campaigns: for those who championed heritable
radicalism, exclusion and deportation was the only viable response; for those who believed it
could be learned, educational programmes would provide the nation’s only true safeguard.
Sigifredo Leal-Guerrero (Goethe University, Frankfurt) - Not everything
turns to the left: radical-right resistance and narratives on political
violence in Colombia and Argentina
The adoption of human rights law principles in many Latin American and international
justice systems have re-contextualized various longstanding struggles of civil society against
State terror and impunity, because responding to demands for justice and reparation has
become a central task for some States: old cases on torture and forced disappearance
perpetrated by State agents have been reactivated and lead to sentences against military
officers. The reactions to these developments are diverse: the people related to the claims
and struggles celebrate and reorganize their activity in order to extend these achievements,
the governments try to articulate new narratives and change the traditional memories which
link the State with bloody repressive –sometimes still active– practices, and the accused
military and their supporters deploy resistance efforts for legally defend the prosecuted and
construct counter- narratives on the processes they starred as rulers and perpetrators.
In the context of my doctoral research I study such radical-right narratives, constructed
within meaning frames related to Cold War counterinsurgency, Catholic fundamentalism and
Neo-Nazi anticommunist antisemitism. Despite my main topic of research is memory in
Colombia, I consider the narratives and organizational efforts deployed by Argentine former
dictators and their supporters because they work together with far-right activists in Colombia
and other countries, in order to transnationally resist the advance of what they consider “the
communist war” against themselves.
I propose to address the far-right radicalism in the conference, because analyzing its
dynamics could help us to broaden our comprehension of the reality in a region where the
progressive political trends are resisted by far-right militants who ironically seem to follow the
Leninist principle of combining all struggle forms for radically transforming society.
24
Panel 6B: Northern Marxisms (IA Rm103)
Dr. William Booth (University College London) - North American
Marxisms, 1945-48
This paper asks whether we may speak of a North American Marxism (or a variety of
North American Marxisms) during the conjuncture following the Second World War. The
extreme tendency towards Browder-inspired ‘liquidationism’ and ‘revisionism’ was attacked in
April 1945 by Jacques Duclos (with the approval of the Soviet government); subsequently
communist parties throughout the Western Hemisphere began publically to re-evaluate their
unconditional support of ‘progressive’ governments.[1] But these ‘deviations’ had hardly been
the organic phenomena implied by the designation of ‘Browderism’ as a heresy. The Soviet
Union was keen to show that Browder had “exaggerated enormously his independence and
importance”;[2] and Carr argues that, for Mexico at least, “those aspects of Browderism
which did take root were built on developments that were already well in place,” most
importantly the amelioration of class conflict.[3]
Groups of North American Marxists (both CPs and other formations) operated in three
contexts: the local; the ideological, encompassing the contradictions inherent in mid-century
communisms; and the geopolitical, in what Magri called the “interregnum” between the
Second World War and the Cold War. Yet each of these contexts was itself in flux: the
Mexican ruling party was moving sharply to the right in conjunction with the postwar
intertwining of the North American economies; in the United States, there was a transition
from Roosevelt’s virtual Popular Front to Truman’s Cold War; in Canada, despite the illegality
of the Communist Party, a historic high point of support in 1945 gave way to a post-war spy
ring scandal. In terms of ideology, alternatives to Stalinist orthodoxy were emerging across
Europe and the developing world; and geopolitically, the global anti-fascist alliance was
rapidly dissolving into a period of institutionalised hostility.
[1] Vernon Van Dyke: The Position and Prospects of the Communists in France. In: Political Science
Quarterly 63 (1948), 1, p.58
[2] James G. Ryan: Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism, Tuscaloosa, University of
Alabama Press, 1997, p.249
[3] Barry Carr: Marxism & Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, Lincoln, University of Nebraska
Press, 1992, pp. 134-140
Dr. Denise Lynn (University of Southern Indiana) - American Communist
Women and Radical Anti-Fascism
This paper seeks to highlight the gendered fear that prompted scores of American
women to join the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the 1930s. Women in the
American Communist Party believed the rise of fascism in Europe was a direct threat to
women’s rights. Marxist doctrine rejected women’s “traditional” roles and instead saw gender
as a construction that followed changes in modes of production; scores of American women
were drawn to the CPUSA for its theoretical rejection of women’s “natural” roles. The rise of
Hitler’s Germany and what Communists read as a push to “nationalize” German women’s
maternity compelled Communist women to argue that fascism was a threat to women’s rights
and perpetuated false ideals of “natural” gender roles. Additionally, Nazi Germany’s physical
proximity to the Soviet Union pushed American Communists to construct an anti-fascist
coalition to protect the USSR.
Communist women dutifully followed the party’s anti-fascist line; however, they
expanded it by arguing that gender inequality was on the rise in fascist nations. As the party
line evolved between 1935 and 1939 into the Popular Front, Communist women and fellow
travelers continued to concentrate on fascism’s danger to race and gender equality.
Communists emphasized the rights of mothers and workers in an effort to better secure the
rights of women. This became more urgent as the CPUSA transformed its early anti-war
25
stance to an anti-fascism one in an effort to protect the USSR, advocate war against fascist
nations, and stem the perceived threat against global socialism. This paper argues that
Party women rejected Nazism’s “maternalist” arguments; they supported collective security
for the USSR; and they advanced women’s rights within the party’s “United Front” and
pushed their radical agenda within the American Communist Party.
Dr. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (University of Bath) - Open Marxism,
Decoloniality and Zapatismo: Delineating new directions in the study of
social emancipation
In this paper I engage with two pioneering approaches to radical resistance and
human emancipation: Decolonial Studies and Open Marxism. By anticipating a conversation
between these two perspectives, I identify their theoretical strategies, limitations and mutual
misrecognitions that prevent fruitful cross-fertilisation. Decolonial thinkers (Castro-Gómez
2000, Lander 2000; Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2000; 2011a, 2011b; Santos 2003) argue that it is
indispensable not only to recognise particular trajectories of experience of power, oppression
and domination (Walsh 2012), but also to ‘overcome both Eurocentric and Third World
‘fundamentalisms’’ (Grosfoguel 2008) by means of ‘critical border thinking’ (Mignolo 2000).
The Decolonial perspective aims to deconstruct Western academia (López Segrera 2000), as
the ‘privileged site of knowledge production’ and stop the ‘epistemicide’ (Santos 2007;
Vázquez 2010; Suárez Krabbe 2009) that this has implied. While ‘multiculturalism’ adapts
ideas of diversity to epistemic coloniality, the Decolonial perspective contends that the world
is ‘pluriversal’ (Conway and Singh 2011: 702). A key indeterminacy in the Decolonial
perspective consists in its failure to consider the processes of constitution of pluriversal
subjectivity within the (global) intensification of the real subsumption of society by capital.
Marxism has never posed the question of ‘who knows,’ and neglected the political
circumstances in which knowledges of all sorts are created (Martín Alcoff 2011: 67; Walsh
2012). The Open Marxist critique of traditional (closed) Marxism (Bonefeld et al 1992a;
1992b; 1995) starts from the premise that Marxism is a theory of struggle (Holloway 1993a;
1993b) — by establishing an inner connection between capital and ‘doing’ (Holloway 2002;
2010). Marx’s method of determinate abstractions can be extended to theorise human
agency against economicist or sociological variants of Marxism (Gunn 1992; Bonefeld 1994).
Yet, when theorising diverse forms of resistance this perspective appears to be unaware of
the epistemic distortion implied in the (North-centric) character of this immanent critique of
capital. By constructing the imaginary dialogue between these two perspectives I will
delineate new directions in the study of social emancipation, which I call a value theory of
pluridiversal subjectivity. I illustrate these ideas with the experience of the Zapatista
movement, which has been analysed separately from both perspectives (Holloway and
Peláez, 1998; Holloway 1996; Walsh, 2012; Grosfoguel, 2012), and which, through
practically bridging indigenous and anti-capitalist resistances, helps to bridge the theoretical
divide between these two approaches.
Panel 7A: Southern Marxisms (UCL WH)
Dr. Matthew Rothwell (Texas Southern University) - The Chinese
Revolution and Latin America: Global Communist Networks and the
Creation of Latin American Maoism
The international communist movement fomented the creation of international networks
that played a key role in the movement of communist ideas around the world. This paper
26
examines the forms that pro-Chinese communist networks took and the ways in which they
impacted Latin American social movements and guerrilla organizations during the years after
the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and especially following the SinoSoviet Split. Using illustrative examples, the paper considers the formal structures of
international ties between communist parties and communist-aligned mass organizations, the
informal circulation of intellectuals from all of Latin America within the countries of the
socialist camp and the reproduction of international communist networks within the refugee
Latin American community of 1960s and 1970s Paris. The paper draws its illustrative
examples from the Maoist movements of Peru, Mexico, Bolivia and Chile.
Anne Freeland (Columbia University) - Thinking Democracy in
Transition: Gramsci and the Latin American Left
In the post-dictatorship political cultures of Latin America, a strategic alliance between
the socialist left and liberal-democratic “center-left” was arguably indispensable. It is within
this field of shifting conceptual and practical alliances—which emerged in the 1970s and
1980s and still conditions a contemporary discourse that nonetheless contends with a
different set of tasks —that I examine in this paper a series of inscriptions of Gramsci's
thought in the theoretical production of Marxist intellectuals in Brazil (Carlos Nelson
Coutinho), Argentina (Juan Carlos Portantiero), and Bolivia (René Zavaleta Mercado). I
argue that Coutinho and Portantiero each deploy conceptual tools drawn from Gramsci's
texts to posit in different ways an already existing collective popular democratic subject with
emancipatory potential, rather than articulating the necessity of constructing new forms of
subjecthood. Zavaleta's use of Gramsci's concepts, I claim, is diagnostic rather than
validating, posing the problem of popular subjectivity as one that cannot be solved once and
for all. Finally, I consider the legacies of these readings within the now-hegemonic organs of
the “new left.”
Prof. Jorge Grespan (University of Sao Paulo) - Caio Prado Jr and
“Brazilian Revolution”
The first great theorist in Brazilian marxist tradition, Caio Prado Jr. (1907-1990)
distinguished himself from other members of Brazilian Communist Party by his early attempts
of not only applying Marxism to national conditions, but also of discussing the very grounds
of theory when applied to the conditions of a country like Brazil. After the significant
interpretation of colonial history as having the meaning of a commercial enterprise in the
Portuguese and European expansion (see “A evolução política do Brasil” – 1933; and
“Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo” – 1942), Caio Prado came to correspondent
conclusions when dealing with the process of industrialization (see “Diretrizes para uma
política econômica brasileira” – 1954) and in his severe analysis of the Party mistakes in the
military coup d’État of 1964 (see “A revolução brasileira” – 1966).
It is this itinerary that my paper wants to clarify, emphasizing how the concept of “meaning”
(in Portuguese: “sentido”) is decisive to Caio Prado analysis of the three mentioned moments
of Brazilian History, i. e., from the colonial to the revolutionary one. “Brazilian Revolution”
would have to follow a way different from the way prescribed by the Communist Party, a way
whose “meaning” and “direction” (“sentido”) are determined by the singularity of Brazilian
own history. The coherence of Caio Prado proposition can be appraised by an analysis of the
concept of “meaning” retracing it to the studies made by the author on philosophical tradition
specially that of Hegel and Marx (see “Notas introdutórias à lógica dialética” – 1959). The
political relevance of Caio Prado proposition can be appraised, on the other side, by the
coherence of his prognosis of revolution with his historical analysis of Brazil since colonial
times.
27
Zoi Vardanika (University of Reading) - FARC as a case of a Non-State
Radicalism
FARC was formally organised in May 1966 and issued a routine political declaration
for a Communist Party supported war of national liberation, with a political declaration
charging that ‘Colombia has become a base of US imperialism against other LA countries
and specifically against Colombia’. Manuel Marulanda became its chief of staff and FARC
declared a call to workers and peasants to support their just struggle. The political violence
present in 1961-62 increased and took place in isolated zones of southern departments
where de facto autonomous communities were created by peasant refugees and guerrillaoutlaws spawned in earlier periods of violence.
This paper seeks to analyse FARC as a case of non-state radicalism. The terms ‘radicalism’
employed in the paper refers both to political and ideological radicalism as well as radical
violent action. The analysis would focus on FARC’s formation, radical ideology, radical
action, FARC’s relations with other radical actors in the Andean region, and finally its current
status in the radical spectrum. State radicalism as a counter-response to FARC’s radicalism,
finally, seems as a necessary part of the research.
Panel 7B: Contemporary Political Economy: From
Developmentalism to ALBA (IA Rm103)
Stephanie Pearce (Queen Mary, University of London) - The Radical
Potential of 21st Century Countertrade
Since Hugo Chávez first articulated Venezuela’s opposition to the US proposed Free
Trade Area of the Americas, at the Quebec summit in 2001, a new discourse has grown up
around the idea of intra-regional trade in Latin American and the Caribbean that focuses on
cooperation over competition, and views exchange as an exercise in solidarity. This has
been realised through a series of new cooperation frameworks and mechanisms which put
forward models of ‘fair’ and ‘compensated’ or ‘counter’ trade; first through the ALBA-TCP (
‘trade agreement of the people’), then Petrocaribe, and most recently via the new virtual
common currency the SUCRE. These regional initiatives share objectives which go beyond
economic growth; addressing social, political, and environmental concerns through the
reassertion of the state, and the people, as economic actors. Such aims are reflected on a
domestic level in the development of local currencies and barter markets.
This paper will explore to what extent these initiatives might catalyse or contribute to a
radical change in regional and even global trade. That is to say a fundamental shift in the
way that majority world countries approach international exchange. This radical potential will
be explored though identifying three key dynamics of 21st century countertrading in Laitn
America and the Caribbean; firstly that it requires a Polanyian understanding of relationships
of exchange in which social concerns are equal to or outweigh profit making motives,
secondly that it represents a move away from the financialization of the neoliberal era
towards needs based economic networks, and thirdly that it both facilitates and encourages
more direct links between producers and consumers.
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Dr. Thomas Muhr (University of Bristol) - Constructing Socialism in the
21st Century: David Harvey’s Co-Revolutionary Theory of Social Change
and Bolivarian Counter-Globalization
This paper integrates critical globalisation theory with David Harvey’s ‘corevolutionary’ theory of social change to develop a framework through which to analyse the
construction of socialism via the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP). I will introduce the concept of (counter-hegemonic)
global ‘pluri-scalar war of position’, to which three elements are of particular relevance: firstly,
Robert Cox’s constructivist neo-Gramscian international relations theory which considers the
structure/agency interplay in the transformation of historical structures; secondly, theories of
place, space and scale, borrowed from human geography; and, thirdly, Harvey’s internally
dynamic and contradictory ‘co-revolutionary’ moments which are the crux of
socialist/communist revolution as permanent process. Informed by inter-disciplinary case
studies from diverse places within the emergent ALBA-TCP space, in countries such as
Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the USA, Harvey’s seven ‘corevolutionary moments’ structure a systematic exploration of the multi-dimensional, pluriscalar construction of socialism. This generates not only a holistic understanding of regional
and global transformations, but also permits identifying social and structural forces at
different scales to illuminate relationships between things, processes and systems and the
conjunction of politics and practices at work.
Dr. Emine Tahsin (Istanbul University) - The Roots of Developmentalism
and Integration in Latin America
During the last decade of Latin America it is seen that alternatives to neoliberal
policies is simply defined under two main titles as neo-developmentalism and 21st century
socialism. Furthermore, within these framework, the historical roots of regionalism,
integration and cooperation has been widely discussed and defined.
As it is known, in Latin America the developmentalist approaches and integration policies
have strong historical roots that goes back to 19th century. The aim of creation “Our
America” (Nuestra América,1891) against to Monroe Doctrine(1823) in some ways reflects
the ideas based on colonialism and independency. Again in the 20th century, it seems that
the divergence and convergence of independency and developmentalism ideas lead to the
emergence of two important schools (structuralism and dependency) from Latin America that
also have worldwide influences.
Based on these this paper aim to define the roots of neostructuralism, development within,
endogenous develeopment and integration concepts in today’s Latin America and aim to
analysis the links of related titles with the past and differentiate the changing conditions both
on internal and external level.
Love (1996,2005) and Kay’s(1989) contributions on economic ideas and institutions of 20th
century would be considered in order to define the main pillars of structuralism and
dependency. Addition to these, structuralism and dependency would be analyzed in
comparison of today’s dominant ideas and institutions in Latin America. Rather than
discussing the relevancy of these ideas, the continuity and discontinuity of these ideas in
today’s environment would tried to be investigated.
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Panel 8A: The Hemispheric Impact of the Cuban Revolution (UCL
WH)
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra (University of Cambridge) - ‘Imagining
Communism in Mexico: The National Liberation Movement and
Washington's Response to Mexican Solidarity with the Cuban
Revolution’
The activism of the Mexican left in favour of the Cuban revolution was led by Lazaro
Cardenas, who saw in Cuba a living example of the need to revisit some of the original
proclaims of the Mexican revolution. In 1961, Cardenas called for the creation of a National
Liberation Movement (MLN) that would bring together all ‘democratic forces’ in the country
and act in defence of the Cuban revolutionary process. Cardenas’s return to active politics
after his presidency was received with great enthusiasm by left intellectuals and students, but
brought about sharp divisions within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and
aggressive reactions among conservative sectors of the population. The loss of unity within
the PRI and the polarisation of public space caused great concern in Washington. The
stability of the political system, as well as its ideological position at the centre of the political
spectrum, appeared at risk. State Department officials living in Mexico saw the birth of this
solidarity movement in the light of the extreme binaries of Cold War politics. They were
therefore confronted with a number of dilemmas: how to prevent the rise of the Mexican left
and the rapprochement of Cuba and Mexico without altering the long political stability of the
later? How to put pressure on the Mexican government in order to demobilize Cardenas, the
moral leader of the party in power? What diplomatic sanctions could be taken against Mexico
without triggering a nationalist repose among the population and the deepening of the
ideological divide? The response of the US government to these dilemmas, as well as it
perception of the consequences of the Cuban revolution in Mexico, was for many years a
matter of speculation, as it was not possible to access the State Department documents from
that period. Numerous diplomatic reports have now been declassified and are the basis of
this research.
Anna Clayfield (University of Nottingham) - ‘L’heure de la révolution est
arrivée!’: armed struggle in Quebec in the 1960s and the influence of the
Cuban Revolution
The 1960s was a period of profound social change in Quebec, and one which was
marked by the emergence of armed activists who called for political revolution and the
separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. A large number of these militants formed part
of the various ‘cells’ which comprised the armed movement Front de Libération du Québec
(FLQ). This movement conducted a violent campaign whose actions included the planting of
bombs and high-profile kidnappings. The FLQ claimed to be both influenced by, and a
legitimate part of, the wave of anti-imperialist struggles being waged in the Third World at this
time; of these struggles, the Cuban Revolution was often cited by the FLQ as having set an
important example for those fighting for the independence of Quebec. This paper will
discuss the extent to which the Cuban model of revolution, and particularly Ernesto
Guevara’s foco theory of guerrilla warfare, shaped the FLQ’s approach to armed struggle,
based on a reading of the literature produced by the movement. Moreover, it will consider
the degree to which the FLQ was also influenced by other armed revolutionary movements in
Latin America, notably those in Brazil and Uruguay.
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Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco (Ramapo College) - Revolution, Radicalism,
and the Fashioning of Modern Cuban Exceptionalism
This paper explores the ways in which the Cuban revolution shaped the political
imaginations of U.S. radicals at a time when Havana was pursuing strategies of statecraft
anchored in the manufacture and distribution of a new revolutionary culture. Within the
broader framework of the "Tricontinental," Cuban nationalist politics played a formidable role
in programs of Yankee dissent in the 1960s and 1970s that challenged standard boundaries
of race and nation. The Cuban state informed these representations and interpretations by
hosting northern radicals and employing, for example, images of civil rights violence in the
U.S. to supplement Havana’s project of nation building. As activists such as Angela Davis,
Stokely Carmichael, and members of the Venceremos Brigades traveled to Cuba to witness
revolution, they were met by Cubans who publicized their trips as testaments to Cuba’s
success and popularity on the world stage. Cuba’s promotion of an anti-imperialist,
anticapitalist, multiracial society moved members of the Brown Berets, Black Panthers,
Young Lords, and other revolutionary organizations to rethink the relationship between
gender, race, and the state, which became manifest in the larger Cold War confrontation
between Cuba and the United States in new national and transnational ways. This
investigation yields alternate passages of cultural exchange that disrupt bipolar divides
between East/West and North/South by repositioning the axis along an alignment of
revolutionary politics.
Prof. Jonathan Brown (University of Texas) - Exporting Revolution with
Fidel and Che
In 1959, when the Cuban Revolution triumphed over the dictator Fulgencio Batista,
only a handful of Latin American strongmen remained in power. Nonetheless, Fidel Castro
and Che Guevara sought to spread their revolution to the rest of Latin America. They sent
filibustering expeditions throughout the Caribbean Basin in 1959. When these hastilyorganized efforts ended in failure, the Cubans really became organized. They established
guerrilla training camps. They actively recruited leftists from countries as far-away as
Argentina. The Cubans indoctrinated a generation of Latin American leftists in theories of
guerrilla warfare and sponsored insurgencies in Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the Congo in Africa. However, Cuban-inspired guerrilla struggles
met defeat everywhere during the 1960s.
Why did the Castro regime perceive the need to export its revolution to the rest of
Latin America? The export of revolution did not meet the favor of Cuba’s chief benefactor,
the Soviet Union. Worst of all, Cuba’s aggressive foreign policies – and U.S. response
thereto – gave the reactionaries throughout the Hemisphere an excuse to support repressive
military governments from 1964 to 1991.
In the final analysis, the answer lies in Castro’s continued struggle against domestic
and external counterrevolution and against the hostility of the United States. But the causes
of Cuba’s export of revolution also had to do with revolutionary processes at home. First,
Castro’s closest advisers nudged him leftward in order to consolidate political power.
Secondly, to rouse the nation to make the revolution at home required Cuban leaders to
advance the revolutionary processes elsewhere. In a sense, war revolutionized the
revolution.
This paper is based on Che’s writings, Fidel’s speeches, and declassified CIA reports.
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Panel 8B: The Body Politic (IA Rm103)
Dr. Massimo Perinelli (University of Cologne) - Radical Sex in 1960s
USA
My paper wants to talk about the San Francisco Sexual Freedom League of the 1960s.
As part of the US radical counterculture the League tried to politicise sexuality as a crucial
point of revolution. It promoted nudity, promiscuity, swinging, and sexual encounters beyond
any normative discourses, including heteronormativity. It’s most prominent figure, Jefferson
Poland, considered himself polysexual respectively denied any classification of the erotic. His
love affair with the artist Tuli Kupferberg – who for example participated in the Dusan
Makavejev sexual revolution film “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism” – reflected the
polymorphous character of his radical sexual politics.
Furthermore the paper is interested in the time period before the emergence of (sexual)
identity politics in the 1970s. Early groups engaged in politics of sexuality, like the Sexual
Freedom League or the Gay Liberation Front or newspapers like the gay Fag Rag with
Charley Shively rejected identity politics or struggles for rights and representation (as the
later gay, black and women’s movements did) and tried to entangle with the struggles of
other radical groups, like the Black Panther Party. What Michel Foucault called “Friendship
as a Way of Life” as a concept of evading normativity, identity and bourgeois subjectivation
through sexual practices became historically visible in the activities of these early groups.
Thus they can be understood as a radical desire to create a heterotopic space rather than a
longing for civil rights and participation within the given system.
Gina Denton (University of Leeds) - Mothers Joining Together in
Sisterhood: Women Strike for Peace, the National Welfare Rights
Organization, and Women’s Radical Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the mainly white, middle-class women of
Women Strike for Peace (WSP) and the black welfare recipients of the National Welfare
Rights Organization (NWRO) came together for a number of joint events. Through these
actions, they protested military spending and cutbacks in domestic funding, and demanded
more power for women within the nation’s political institutions. In doing so, activists
consistently appealed to one another, and to the public, as mothers. As welfare rights leader
Beulah Sanders explained in 1970, ‘Women Strike for Peace and Welfare mothers have
much in common. We are all working to save the children.’
This paper explores this unusual and largely overlooked coalition. In recent years, historians
of 1960s and 1970s social protest have begun to pay greater attention to women’s activism
and to recognise the gendered nature of political radicalism. Indeed, a number of scholars
have documented the diverse ways in which women politicised their identities as mothers
during this period. Nevertheless, most studies have looked at women’s radical activism in the
context of distinct social movements and little attention has been paid to alliances across
difference. Yet, as this paper will argue, analysing these cross-movement coalitions and the
conditions that encouraged their occurrence is vital for understanding the complexities of
radical politics. This paper examines the factors that brought WSP and NWRO together
during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It contends that the alliance was possible, in part,
because both groups had evolved from single-issue movements to view themselves as part
of a broader struggle for peace, racial and economic justice, and women’s rights. But the
partnership was also shaped by these women’s belief in motherhood as a basis for activism
and a source of unity. Indeed, even as WSP and NWRO increasingly identified with the
feminist movement, activists continued to relate to one another as mothers. Thus, this study
contributes to a better understanding of the diverse relationship between maternalism and
feminism. However, while a shared sense of responsibility as mothers helped bring WSP and
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NWRO together during this period, cooperation was ultimately short-lived, and this paper
also explores the divides of race and class that hindered the development of a more
sustained alliance. Ultimately then, this paper aims to demonstrate the way in which gender
intersects with race and class to shape political radicalism and social change.
Prof. Gudrun Loehrer (Free University of Berlin) - Defying the limits of the
gendered body hierarchy: A transnational perspective on the Women’s
Martial Arts Movement
The emergence of the women’s self-defense and martial arts movement in the early
1970s was strongly tied to the anti-sexual assault and anti-rape movement. Becoming aware
of the scope of violence against women, feminists in North America set out to work against
the myth of the female need for protection. As a form of “physical feminism”, they began to
radically question the gendered body hierarchy and the presumed helplessness of women.
Not very skilled at the time but all the more combat-ready, women established self-defense
and martial arts classes all over Canada and the United States. Through networks such as
the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation and annual summer training camps, the
movement became visible beyond North America. Women from Europe started to network
with martial arts teachers in the United States and laid the foundations for a transnational
movement in Europe. While the underlying cause of the women’s martial arts movement was
self-empowerment and the empowerment of women in general, the assumption of a
universal ‘sisterhood’ was challenged from very early on. Rooted in the North American
countercultures and the autonomous left in Europe, women questioned not only gender
hierarchies, but all forms of hierarchy and dominance. At the crossroads of lesbian and
women’s history, and the history of the body, this paper analyzes the women’s martial arts
and self-defense movement from a transnational perspective.
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