Anticolonial Internationalisms: A Symposium
Event information>
This bilingual English-French symposium will delve into worldwide decolonial movements. The expansive internationalist imaginaries of anti-colonialism offer crucial insights for today's global crises.
About the Symposium
The radical legacy of twentieth century anticolonial movements casts long shadows into our time. Before the rise of globalization, these struggles were self-consciously internationalist, seeking to transform the world itself. The global and revolutionary character of Third Worldism, Tricontinentalism, the Non-aligned Movement and other anti-imperialist projects continue to captivate scholars while informing a new generation of antiracist activists.
In this bilingual English-French symposium, our invited speakers will trace this global dimension, examining the political thought of historic decolonial struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, North and Subsaharan Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
Programme
Opening remarks by Jackqueline Frost and Davide Gallo Lassere (University of London Institute in Paris)
Panel 1: Mariátegui et Fanon: Théoriciens anticolonialistes du passé, présent et futur
Chaired by Jackqueline Frost
Luis Martínez Andrade (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Marxisme anticolonial et internationalisme chez José Carlos Mariátegui
Immanquablement, les 7 Essais d’interprétation de la réalité péruvienne est l’ouvrage le plus important d’une pensée marxiste proprement latino-américaine. Au travers d’une analyse matérialiste de la religion, de la culture, de la structure économique et de l’éducation, José Carlos Mariátegui souligne le caractère colonial de la société latino-américaine. La proposition d’un socialisme indo-américain a été cruciale pour affronter les courants étapistes (tant de l’APRA que de la IIIe Internationale) des années 1920 et, par conséquent, pour refuser tout type d’évolutionnisme eurocentriste promu par les tendances réformistes. De plus, une telle proposition peut aujourd’hui encore contribuer à l’élaboration d’un projet éco-socialiste pour le millénaire à venir. L’héritage du Péruvien peut être repéré dans les débats autour du « socialisme du XXI e siècle », de l’« écosocialisme », du « pouvoir populaire », du « tournant décolonial » et, bien évidemment, du lien entre les notions de « mythe » et de « front unique » pour lequel la religiosité populaire ainsi que les alliances politiques jouent un rôle fondamental dans les processus d’émancipation. Ce n’est pas un hasard si Gustavo Gutiérrez, le fondateur de la théologie de la libération, considère l’œuvre de José Carlos Mariátegui comme l’une de ses principales sources d’inspiration. Dans cette communication, nous allons aborder la dimension anticapitaliste et anticoloniale de sa pensée.
Nicola Lamri (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)
Le discours inédit de Frantz Fanon au Conseil de la World Assembly of Youth, Accra 1960 : premières hypothèses interprétatives
Entre le 9 et le 25 août 1960 se tient, à l’Université d’Accra, le VIII Conseil de la World assembly of youth (Way), le rassemblement international regroupant les organisations de jeunesse de tendance pro-occidentale. Les jeunes Immanuel Wallerstein et Elaine Mokhtefi, qui rejoindra plus tard le bureau new-yorkais du Front de libération nationale algérien, coorganisent l’événement, contribuant à l’affirmation d’une ligne résolument anticolonialiste au sein de l’organisation, traditionnellement vouée, dans le contexte de la guerre froide, à la lutte contre le communisme soviétique. Le 17 août, Frantz Fanon est, en tant qu’ambassadeur itinérant du Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne en Afrique, appelé à prononcer un discours adressé aux délégués de la Way. Cependant, malgré le souhait de voir paraître la transcription de l’allocution dans les revues Les temps modernes ou Vérité-Liberté, le texte ne verra jamais le jour et le projet sera abandonné en raison de son décès, survenu en décembre 1961. Soixante-quatre ans après, les archives du Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage, le service secret extérieur français, restituent le manuscrit perdu. Cette découverte documentaire contribue à faire la lumière sur le Fanon « politique », dans la phase qui sépare la publication de L’année V de la révolution algérienne et celle des Damnés de la Terre. Dans cette communication, nous présenterons les aspects saillants du discours d’Accra 1960.
Panel 2: Revolutionary Media: The Cinema and Print Culture of Historic Anticolonialism
Chaired by Jackqueline Frost
Chana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge)
Revolutionary Papers: Counter-institutions, Politics and Cultures in Anticolonial Journals
Anticolonial periodicals played a key role in the making of left, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial organizations, politics, and cultures across various locations in the Global South. Looking at multiple digital periodical tools on the Revolutionary Papers site, I will show how the periodical became a key device for their creation and reproduction, often under conditions of repression, political violence and destruction.
Alexandra Reza (University of Bristol)
‘Ready for the revolution?’ The anticolonial cinema of Sarah Maldoror.
This paper discusses the work of Sarah Maldoror in the context of broader ideas about revolutionary film making and aesthetics that circulated amongst African cinéastes in the 1960s and 1970s.
Panel 3: Recovering and Re-inventing Anticolonial Internationalism in the 21st Century
Chaired by Davide Gallo Lassere
Sandro Mezzadra (Uniersità di Bologna)
Reframing Internationalism: For a Politics of Freedom and Equality in an Age of War and Transition
What are the prospects for a renewed anti-imperialism amid the crises, multipolarizing
tendencies, and imperial ventures of the present? In this paper I tackle such a question by insisting on the need to reinvent internationalism. In doing so, I remain aware of the roles played by forms and practices of internationalism in historical processes of anti-imperialism. In rethinking internationalism in the present conjuncture, I emphasize both the distinctiveness of the problems we face today (which implies a discontinuity with that legacy) and the fact that anti-imperial struggle is an ongoing process. The ideas outlined in this talk are elaborated in the forthcoming book, entitled The Rest and the West (Verso), that I have just written with Brett Neilson.
Françoise Vergès (Collège d’études mondiales)
Internationalism and Struggles for Liberation in a Time of Violent Counter Revolution: Post-Racism, Post-Patriarchy and Post-Capitalism
This talk focuses on the reactionary and proto-fascist counter-offensive that is at work today. The panic of the dominant classes in the face of the feminist revolution, as well as indigenous, anti-racist and queer movements, has made them react with murderous violence. What is more, our period clearly shows the impossibility of reconciling settler colonialism and democracy. After BLM and contemporary social movements (feminist, indigenous, etc.), Palestine draws a new line. The invasion of Ukraine, the occupation of Kashmir, xenophobic ethno-nationalism, the illusion of purity of blood and origin, censorship, the destruction of the planet by neo-liberalism and war are all pushing us to develop new forms of solidarity.
Jackqueline Frost and Davide Gallo Lassere will be closing the event with final remarks. The symposium will end at 19h.
Speakers
Luis Martínez Andrade est docteur en sociologie de l’EHESS. Auteur de Religion sans Rédemption. Contradictions sociales et rêves éveillés (Van Dieren, 2015), d’Écologie et libération. Critique de la modernité dans la théologie de la libération (Van Dieren, 2016) et de Dialectique de la modernité et socialisme indo-américain. Essais d’histoire intellectuelle (L’Harmattan, 2023). Il est membre du Système National des Chercheurs au CONACYT, lauréat du Prix « Pensar a Contracorriente » en 2009.
Nicola Lamri est doctorant en histoire contemporaine à l'Université polytechnique Hauts-de-France/Università di Bologna. Sa recherche se concentre sur la circulation des idées et des pratiques anticolonialistes dans le bassin méditerranéen, avec une attention particulière pour les relations italo-algériennes. Publications : "Fra memoria della Resistenza e guerra di decolonizzazione algerina: gli italiani e la solidarietà a Henri e Gilberte Alleg", Italia contemporanea, 303/2023, "La montagna, la Resistenza, il maquis: un partigiano piemontese nella guerra d’Algeri", Maydan, 3/2023.
Chana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. Dr Morgenstern is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her upcoming book Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature, Translation and Magazines (EUP 2025), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary and cultural collaborations, from the heyday of decolonization in the 1950s to the present day. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production (https://revolutionarypapers.org/). She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.
Alexandra Reza is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Bristol University and author of Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the end of Empire (OUP, 2024). She joined the University of Bristol in 2021 as a lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures, and director of the BA in Comparative Literatures and Cultures. Before that, she was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford (2018-21), where she conducted research on culture and politics in Conakry, Guinea in the 1960s. Her DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford (2015-18) focussed on anticolonial literary journals in French, English and Portuguese in the years around African decolonization.
Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna. He is adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society of the Western Sydney University and at the Center for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His recent work has centered on the relations between globalization, migration and capitalism, on contemporary capitalism as well as on postcolonial criticism. He participates in the ‘post-workerist’ debates being one of the founders of the website www.euronomade.info. Among his recent books: In the Marxian Workshops (2018) and Un mondo da guadagnare. Per una teoria politica del presente (2020). With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (2019).
Françoise Vergès is a political theorist and decolonial feminist activist. Among her most recent works: Un féminisme décoloniale (La Fabrique 2019), Une théorie féministe de la violence. Pour une politique antiraciste de la protection (La Fabrique 2020); Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (la Fabrique 2023).
This page was last updated on 7 May 2024