Short Abstract

This panel examines the transnational intellectual and political networks that sustained solidarity against apartheid (1950s- 1980s) interrogating the material and institutional means through which ideas of liberation travelled: academic networks, youth movements, cinema and the press.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the transnational intellectual and political networks that sustained solidarity against apartheid from the 1950s to the 1980s. Moving beyond historiographies centred on the African National Congress and its leading figures, it foregrounds alternative anti-apartheid traditions — the Pan Africanist Congress, Black Consciousness, the Non-European Unity Movement — and asks how their ideas circulated, adapted, and were received abroad. How did exiled activists and intellectuals negotiate concepts such as race, revolution, class, gender, and development when forging alliances with subaltern groups in host societies? What role did exile play in structuring transnational solidarity, and how did local struggles in the Global North and South inspire, radicalise, or reshape South African activism — and vice versa?

The panel also interrogates the material and institutional means through which ideas of liberation travelled: academic networks and grants, religious institutions, communist and student youth movements, publishing houses, cinema, and the press. It invites contributions on the sociology of circulation — the individual and collective trajectories of conscientisation linking intellectuals, activists, clerics, students, and educators across the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and beyond.

We welcome papers using intellectual biography and prosopography, network studies, reception studies, and grassroots or intersectional approaches attentive to tensions between elite and popular mobilisation. Building on recent turns toward connected and global histories of anti-apartheid struggle, the panel aims to map the plural, contested channels through which South African liberation thought became a genuinely worldwide intellectual and political project.

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