Short Abstract

This panel approaches international solidarity with African liberation movements through an “African prism”: shifting the analytical lens from those who provided solidarity to those who sought, negotiated, reshaped, and used it.

Long Abstract

This panel approaches international solidarity with African liberation movements through an “African prism”: shifting the analytical lens from those who provided solidarity to those who sought, negotiated, reshaped, and used it. During the Global Cold War, Eastern, Western, and non-aligned state and non-state actors engaged in a wide variety of transnational relationships under the unifying term "solidarity.” These transnational circuits through which goods, ideas, expertise, techniques of government, and people moved across the globe have received increasing attention from scholars of Cold War History in recent yeary, but the archival prominence of donor institutions, situated outside of Africa has often privileged perspectives on these relationships from outside the continent. This panel asks what new dimensions of African political life become visible when refracting the conventional donor-recipient binary. How did liberation movements pursue relationships with competing providers of solidarity, negotiate donor expectations, mobilize competing forms of aid, and translate international exchanges into local political projects? How did transcend and challenge the donor-recipient binary? By placing "aid recipients" - liberation movements and their members - at the centre of this history, it seeks to reveal how and why 'recipients' shaped solidarity as a contested, multidirectional, and historically situated field. We welcome papers that foreground African actors and sources, including liberation-movement archives, oral histories, memoirs, musical and audiovisual collections, private and diplomatic archives, and records of international conferences and organizations such as the OAU. We also encourage innovative readings of donor archives that recover recipient perspectives.