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- Convenors:
-
Nadine Siegert
(University of Bayreuth)
Polly Savage (SOAS, University of London)
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Short Abstract:
We consider the cultural dimensions of transnational solidarity with African liberation movements from the 1960s-80s. Focusing on nexus points of education, festivals, images and print media, we ask how exchange between Africa and the socialist world provided platforms for new futures.
Long Abstract:
Recent research on the transnational networks of African liberation movements has offered new insight into the intertwined histories of international socialism, revolutionary nationalism in Africa, and local solidarity campaigns. Several studies have focused on the distribution of Soviet, Cuban and Chinese diplomatic and military aid in Africa from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, but what is less well documented is the more informal circulation of people, ideas and images into, and out of the continent, through the socialist and non-aligned networks of the time.
Seeking to foreground the cultural dimensions of transnational solidarity with African liberation movements, this panel invites contributions that critically engage with the modes or nexus points of exchange between Africa and the socialist world. The convenors welcome case studies including (but not limited to): education; festivals; conferences; visual arts; touring exhibitions; film; graphic design and print media. Equally welcome are critical reflections on questions including: What were the aesthetics of socialist solidarity? How did individuals experience and respond to these networks? What is the enduring potential of these networks today? Locating our enquiry in the interstitial spaces opened by the politics of solidarity, we consider how cultural platforms offered possibilities for imagining, and confronting, new, internationalist futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Kate Cowcher (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
Amidst Cold War divisions, the International Congress of Africanists brought Africanist scholars together on the African continent. This paper explores debates at the earliest Congresses surrounding the emergent study of visual art, and its relevance to national progress and continental solidarity.
Paper long abstract:
Established in the early 1960s, the International Congress of Africanists brought together African and Africanist scholars from around the world in the emerging capital cities of a liberating continent. Concurrent with a Cold War-fuelled rush for knowledge about Africa, the first three gatherings were held in Ghana (1962), Senegal (1967) and Ethiopia (1973), with the earliest dominated by white scholars, particularly from America and the USSR. The third iteration in Addis Ababa was opened by Emperor Haile Selassie, whose inaugural speech reflected on the fact that for the first time in the Congress' existence African and black American scholars outnumbered white delegates. Africans, Haile Selassie remarked, must come to 'carry a greater share of the study and research on their continent than they do at present.' The stakes were high, he remarked; African knowledge had 'great relevance to the struggle our continent is now waging against poverty, ignorance and disease.' This paper explores the significance of the early International Congresses against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, asserting that they provided direct points of contact, contest and exchange in an atmosphere that did not otherwise allow for such. Particular focus falls on the evolution of debates about the visual arts of Africa, how they should be studied, historically and methodologically, and what role they and their histories had to play in emergent narratives of national progress and continental solidarity.
Ana Moledo (Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University)
Paper short abstract:
I investigate the activities of the Marxist-Leninist Liberation Support Movement in the US and the extensive amount of first-hand information they produced and circulated in order to raise-awareness about the struggles and the post-colonial futures imagined by the MPLA, Frelimo or PAIGC
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims at pluralizing the understanding of socialist solidarities by bringing into focus a small US and Canadian activist network - the Liberation Support Movement (1968-1982). Despite the strong anti-communist atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s and against the governmental stance on southern Africa liberation, this small group with Marxist-Leninist basis toured the US and Canada, distributing information and raising funds in support of the "vanguard movements" of Southern Africa. The connections with the MPLA, Frelimo and PAIGC, among others, were forged through the visits of LSM activists to guerrilla zones and liberated areas in the different territories as well as their encounters with anticolonial leaders in revolutionary hubs like Dar es Salaam. The extensive collection of oral histories they compiled and disseminated through pamphlets and other media voiced the demands of these liberation movements and contributed to spread their ideological approaches towards revolutionary nationalism, thus calling upon the emancipatory claims of the black population and migrant communities in the US and Canada. I argue that the rhetoric and visual representations used in the LSM's communication materials remind of those previously employed in other solidarity campaigns of socialist internationalism, although merged or even disguised under more prominent appeals to independence and Third World revolution. Hence, the paper sheds light on another side of informal socialist solidarities that were not rooted within the socialist block or any socialist country but still shared certain principles and alternative ideals that paved the way for transnational exchange and cooperation
Rebecca Wolff (University of California (UCLA))
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the formation of socialist solidarity networks in Africa, North America, and Latin America through the proliferation of the image of the woman and mother revolutionary in political posters.
Paper long abstract:
In the late twentieth century, the image of the armed woman and mother revolutionary became a global visual trope, featured in North American, Latin American, and European political posters in support of socialist armed forces in Vietnam, Eritrea, Mozambique, El Salvador, Angola, and Nicaragua—and often in posters produced within these countries. Why was the woman/mother revolutionary such a widespread figure through which the causes of socialist movements were celebrated and promoted? How were networks of solidarity demonstrated through this image? To answer these questions, I consider American, Canadian, and Cuban posters produced in solidarity with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua that depict the woman/mother revolutionary. Through comparative and iconographical analysis, I examine how the woman/mother revolutionary migrated from imagery produced by the MPLA and FSLN to posters in circulation across the globe. I argue that socialist organizations in the Western Hemisphere seized upon the image of the woman/mother revolutionary because it conflated two foundational ideals of socialism—the revolution and motherhood—into a single figure. At the same time, the image of the woman/mother revolutionary reflected the specific ideologies of the MPLA and FSLN, and the sociopolitical and cultural circumstances of the liberation movements in Angola and Nicaragua. By circulating this image, socialist-oriented organizations could speak to these realities while communicating their own ideologies to an international audience. Thus, through the study of a prevalent visual motif, a network of solidarity across continents emerges.