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Abstract
This text presents a dialogue between Omar Séne, an activist-artist from Senegal, and two researchers, Sandrine Gukelberger from Germany and Anna Grimaldi from the UK. The intention of this particular collaboration is to interrogate the relationship between Pan-African activism in the present and the modes through which they relate to the past. It combines and recontextualises various artefacts, narrative interviews and extracts of Séne’s personal archive (including photographs, dance choreographies and on- and offline texts). The aim is twofold: on the one hand, we provide a situated perspective on the pathways of becoming a youth activist in Senegal today, and on the other, we explore one individual’s experience of a collective identification with Pan-Africanism. Through this text, we demonstrate how figures of the past are mobilised to drive youth engagement in the present, and how these inherited struggles are perpetuated through bodies.
Abstract
This article examines the ways in which artefacts of Cold War social movements are reassembled in and through the creation of archives in the present. We ask: how have artefacts of past social movements been re-engaged with memory work through intergenerational transmission and performance? Through the analysis of selected examples, including a) ethnographic work on a Pan-African social movement in Senegal, b) archival research of Cuban Cold War graphic design, and c) a decolonial pedagogical project taking place at a UK university, we illustrate the different – and at times overlapping – dimensions of the ‘memory-activism nexus’ they engage (; 2020). Through a theoretical framework that draws from social movement theory, memory studies and performance theory in relation to archives, we identify and analyse contemporary engagements with past social movements. We argue that through distinct interpretations, (re)assemblages, and framings of artefacts, memory work through the creation of archives is necessarily an embodied and performative practice.
Abstract
In 1967, amid the U.S. war in Vietnam, distinguished leftist intellectuals and activists gathered in Sweden and Denmark to establish the first citizens’ tribunal. Initiated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the purpose of the International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) was to put the U.S. government on trial for its military actions in Southeast Asia. This article has two objectives. First, it argues that this activist endeavour was embedded in a larger internationalist movement against Western imperialism, namely Tricontinentalism, of which the war in Vietnam was a connecting factor. Second, the article investigates the tribunal as a manifestation of the solidarity that the New Left in the West maintained with revolutionary movements in the Third World. It aims to show the utility of the theoretical concept of political solidarity, most thoroughly elaborated by Sally J. Scholz, for the global history analysis of social justice movements. At the same time, it contends the necessity of additional parameters when studying manifestations of political solidarity in a post- and settler-colonial context, drawing on new scholarship on colonial-sensitive solidarity. By carving out the specificities of this case of activism on the theoretical ground, this investigation also highlights the importance, advantages, and pitfalls of political anti-imperialist solidarity.
Abstract
Tan Teng Phee’s Behind Barbed Wire is an excellent, meticulously researched book that should transform the way scholars understand both the social history, and the historiography, of the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). In this work, Tan sets out in full detail the British colonial state’s rationale for establishing an expansive network of more than five hundred detention camps – or New Villages – under the Emergency’s Briggs Plan. In addition to this important contribution, Tan also explains the gruelling reality of life inside the camps for the 570,000 or more mostly Chinese Malayans whose social, political, and economic roles – and private, internal lives – the state coercively reconstructed inside them. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, and James C. Scott’s work on the hidden transcripts and weapons of the weak, Tan’s book also lays the groundwork for a new wave of work on the Emergency. Thanks to Tan, future scholars are now by far better equipped to examine sensitive questions such as how and why Malayans experienced the Emergency in a racially differentiated manner, and the role the Emergency played in constructing Malaya’s “consociational” politics, creating a specific path to Malayan decolonisation.
These texts provide important first-hand information about the Tapuia and other indigenous peoples during the Dutch conquest, revealing their cultural practices and knowledge while also detailing their strategic engagements with each other and with different European colonizers.
These texts provide important first-hand information about the Tapuia and other indigenous peoples during the Dutch conquest, revealing their cultural practices and knowledge while also detailing their strategic engagements with each other and with different European colonizers.