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This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.
5217P GLOBAL JUSTICE-PT/lb.qxd 13/1/09 19:59 Page 196 8 Geographies of transnational solidarity Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable
The struggle to end Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cabo Verde and São Tome and Principe, waged between 1961 and 1974, generated a wide range of transnational solidarity activities as well as attracting humanitarian aid from around the globe. Yet research into these solidarity networks has so far been relatively meagre 1 and among US transnational solidarity
him off. The homemade placards of the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen’s Association UK read ‘Long Live Ayub’. 21 The contrasting reaction in London at this time demonstrates migratory transnational solidarities and questions of identity albeit in two directions. First-generation settled Pakistanis generally identified with their country of birth and its political institutions. In 1951
at the hands of the police, the violent techniques that the Israeli state enacts against them. 2 Public expressions of transnational solidarity erupted across a range of contexts in which protest movements had been mobilising. The widespread political and affective identifications with Floyd were articulated with local demands for social justice and struggles against racism. Demonstrators in the UK
This chapter focuses on the undervalued importance of the voice of immigrant workers to the French New Left after 1968. The dominant image of 1968 has been middle-class students attempting to unite with the French working class. Those on the left most imprinted by their experience in May 1968 also sought, however, to find, nurture, and channel the voice of France’s semi-skilled or unskilled immigrant industrial workers, mostly recruited from its former colonies and Mediterranean hinterlands, into a collective project of total social transformation. As such, immigrant workers had the potential to connect anticolonial revolts in the Third World with working-class rebellion in the heart of Western capitalism. New Left organisations which emerged from the libertarian and anti-hierarchical culture of 1968’s student milieu attempted to create spaces where they could capture this multinational group’s right to speak. New understandings of class solidarity broke from the confines of the nation-state and novel emotional registers emerged. An inclusive category of class provided the French New Left with a language to imagine an amalgam of culturally diverse national groups employed in French Fordist industry as a political subject. This chapter shows how immigrant workers were essential in developing new conceptions of global transnational solidarity and, as a consequence, sustaining a brief moment of global revolutionary hope. The growing absence of this voice in French public life after the early 1980s encouraged both left-wing melancholy and radically different experiences of time.
these movements combated colonialism in different ways, both militarily and politically. This chapter scrutinises how these transnational solidarity events encouraged the growth of European anticolonial support vis-à-vis the African liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies and contributed to internationalising their demands for independence. In addition, it explores how
film in the country to achieve ‘Diamond-Jubilee’ status by being screened in cinemas for more than one hundred weeks straight. Zerqa offers a fascinating cultural text to study not only visually and narratively, but also ideologically in terms of how transnational solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle was imagined and constructed in Pakistan. This chapter examines how
citizenship rights, 13 perceived the USA’s imperial cultural and economic interventions in Greece, as identical to the structures underpinning colonialism. 14 Comparable to Young’s subject of study, the Greek Left, in exile and in Greece alike, articulated its affiliation with the Third World, and as such identified with a shared international consciousness and mode of transnational solidarity. 15
to forget, absorbed the world and shrank the horizon of Adorno’s intellectual work and political understanding. If construed narrowly as a political theorist, Adorno has clearly no relevance at all to accounts of the transnational solidarity of the 1960s. Utterly unable to see events and actors in the anticolonial struggles and postcolonial movements of the Global South in