(Re)activations of Tricontinentalism in the Past and in the Present
Dr. Anna Grimaldi & Dr. Sandrine Gukelberger
20th April 2022
Remembering a Tricontinental Past was a one-day, online symposium held in April 2022, in no precise time or place. Inspired by the notion of tricontinentalism – solidarity and social movements based on the concept of a collective Latin American, Asian, and African identity -, the symposium set out to explore how different artefacts of the past, including testimonies, documents, photos, political ephemera, and repertoires of contention, are called upon in the present. We believe that the contents of such artefacts and the particular ways they are called upon matter when it comes to understanding the situated knowledges and collective identities of activism today. Understanding such artefacts, however, is no easy task: social movements employ a vast range of cultural practices and a universe of forms of expression through interactions, rhetoric, embodied modes of communication, and other signs and symbols.
Ultimately, we were guided by the following three questions: How do we, as activists and researchers, approach these artefacts theoretically and methodologically? How do we locate, access, and collate artefacts that have been produced and exist within transnational and translocal spheres? And, how did activists of the past handle the visual and the textual differently, and how do activists of the present relate to them?
Opening the stage was Berthold Molden’s presentation on Combative Memory and Mnemonic Hegemony, through which one of the most pressing aspects of the debate on the historiography of Tricontinentalism was approached. Seeking to understand the invisibilization of histories and protagonists of the Tricontinental that are condemned to the past, Molden proposes the concept of mnemonic hegemony. According to dominant narratives and discourses of the Global Cold War, struggles and visions for the future of left-wing movements were brought to an end with the victory of liberal democracy in the 1970s. In the context of our symposium, tendencies to conflate tricontinentalism with post-colonialism threaten the same by memorialising the past and reducing it to a series of idealistic and frustrated struggles, denying the possibility of continuities. We argue on the contrary by focusing on how tricontinentalism becomes activated in present-day movements.
Addressing these silences is as much a methodological as it is a historiographical endeavour. As Molden convincingly demonstrates, the power to do so comes in the form of practising and asserting alternative schemes of interpretation of social reality. We, as scholars, must incorporate a range of diverse ontological dimensions into our written work, including space, time, and being. We need to question the applicability of linear timelines that place historical processes neatly within either the past, present, or future by engaging in the multidirectionality of timelines; we need to engage with circular images and procedures to reactivate the memory and history of the past within present struggles. The concept of utopia, after all, is only the West’s dominant form of anticipating the future; it might not exist in so-called indigenous struggles in such linear terms.
Taking Bethold’s arguments on board, we reflect on the presentations of the symposium not in the order they took place, but rather, in the formation they speak to us and our guiding questions most clearly. We begin, oddly enough, with the second half of the day. Part two of the symposium looked at the long, global 1960s and the production of printed materials as ways of transmitting and communicating the ideas and struggles of tricontinentalism beyond national borders. Printed press provides specific schemes of interpretation, allowing actors to propose alternative frames and perspectives on their vision of solutions to local, national, regional, and global problems alike. In more tangible ways than their embodied and discursive counterparts, printed materials evidence the transnational dimensions of solidarity and justice by documenting and mapping the transit of ideas and practices across borders through the written and visual clues they contain.
Providing an overview of the history of Época, a short-lived but nonetheless powerful Uruguayan radical left-wing newspaper that existed between 1962 and 1967, Marina Cardozo’s paper examined critical experiences of Tricontinentality in print. The publication and its contents document some of the most important milestone events of Latin America’s Cold War from the otherwise suppressed and marginalised voice of the New Left. But more importantly, the collection captures the evolving nature, discourse, identity, and strategies of the Latin American New Left of the period as well as its relationship to Tricontinentalism. Época was at its core a product of transnationalism: it provided a space for Southern Cone exiles to collectively contemplate, communicate, and influence one another. Bringing together a vast range of themes, the publication covered local and international news, opinion pieces, updates on union activity, and even provided cultural commentary such as film recommendations. It connected disparate activist groups and political organisations from across the globe, and provided a much-needed source of information on events ongoing in Indonesia, Vietnam, Angola, and of course, Cuba.
Scrutinising the ambiguities that can pervade printed media was the paper presented by Cho-kiu Li and Kin-long Tong, who examined the Federation, a student publication run by the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) from the late 1950s. Acknowledging the relationship between Hong Kong and the Global South is essentially non existent given its conceptualisation as a capitalist British/Chinese city, Cho-kiu and Kin-long employs tricontinentalism in an attempt to historicise the publication’s activism. The paper understands ‘liberty’ as an ideoscape, emphasising the ambiguities between, on the one hand, the democratising and liberalising implications of a student press with murky ties to the CIA, and on the other hand, anticapitalist aims and objectives. The discussion that followed interrogated the dissemination of information at a time when print culture was for the educated elite. The communist party, on the other hand, reached the people through theatre and cinema; communicating through images. What the paper highlighted was the uncomfortable space between traditional categorisations of tricontinental actors, proposing as a response the notion of Tricontinental Liberalism.
Picking up where part two left us, at the end of the 1960s, part one of the symposium provided a mosaic of snapshots into various forms of inter-generational dialogues of Tricontinentalism. Through four distinct but interconnected presentations, the overarching themes of this part were the theories and practices comprising Tricontinental activism across and between generations. Critically, the four speakers differed in their positionality, allowing a range of intersectional approaches including class, race, and ethnicity, as well as notions of Pan-Africanism, Pan-Latin Americanism, and Pan-Indigeneity to come to the fore. This section thus initiated a dialogue between the various transnational identities, struggles, and solidarities that share commonalities with the project of the Tricontinental. Ultimately, this both addressed and raised further questions surrounding the memorialisation and historiography of knowledges - how struggles of the past are, and are not, (re)appropriated in the name of those whose struggles were cut short.
Returning to the 1970s, Sebastian Garbe presented the notion of Threads of Autonomy to discuss the historical struggle of the Mapuche for autonomy and decolonisation in Chile dating back to the colonial era. Sebastian’s presentation was characterised by several iterations of the contention between the Mapuche’s struggle for autonomy on the one hand, and their relationship with the Chilean nation-state and non-Indigenous supporters on the other. In many ways, the Mapuche struggle has benefited from alliances with the Chilean left, its political actors and its exile communities, but Mapuche actors also shaped their own collective identity through their diasporic experiences in Europe and built important transnational networks. Until today, Chile, as a territory and national identity, continues to threaten Mapuche autonomy and paternalistically misconstrue, misrepresent, and mistreat their demands.
Speaking from the more intimate position as an activist and organisational leader, Tania Ramírez spoke of H.I.J.O.S - The Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence in Mexico. First founded in Argentina in 1995, H.I.J.O.S. is an organisation built on resistance to the Pan-Latin American phenomenon of State Terror since the late 1960s, but has also seen sister organisations emerge in Western Europe. H.I.J.O.S. - an acronym that also spells out the Spanish word for ‘children’ - provides a space for families of victims of State Terror: torture, disappearance, assassination to raise awareness and fight for justice.
In her presentation, Tania reflected on the echoes and resemblances between the practices and performances of H.I.J.O.S. today and those in whose name they protest. The group carries out a number of different activities, such as placing posters and photos with the names and dates of disappeared persons in public spaces, both to draw attention to the movement and to counter state attempts to ‘disappear’ a person by re-affirming their existence both visually and through collective memorialisation; by acknowledging the impossibility of reconciling with the past. They also aim to assert their space within collective memory and reinserting shared histories of state terror into a sense of national historiography such by replacing street names or the sacrilegious act of ‘washing the flag’ - a performance in which the red stripe of the Mexican flag is washed away like blood. The organisation’s activities are also a transnational response to the transnational threat of authoritarian states across Latin America which have collaborated to track and repress oppositional actors even beyond borders: Tania describes an instance when, inspired by Argentine artistic performance, H.I.J.O.S. Mexico protested the violent detention of a Colombian university professor.
Exploring further ways of channelling the relationship between past and present was Omar Sene, a dancer, activist, and pedagogue from Dakar, Senegal. Omar’s presentation, titled Panafrican Movements and the Continuity of the Decolonial Struggle, discussed his work with youth through the Dalifort Dance Festival. Omar’s dance workshops aim to promote hope, active citizenship, and solidarity that encourages youth to tend to their communities and become actively engaged in changing their local environments. For Omar, using dance to connect the mental to the physical is a way of taking up the struggle of anti-colonial forefathers such as Thomas Akara, Patrice Lumumba, Cheik Ankh Diop, and Amilcar Cabral, who provide the youth with the means and desire to fight. Drawing parallels between the French-appointed African leaders of the colonial era and corrupt political elites of today, Omar argued that social movements cannot be divided along ideological lines nor resort to party or union politics.
Exploring in fine-grained detail the relationship between activist and researcher was Raphael Van Arkadie, whose presentation, Decolonising Research: An Activist’s Tool, reflected on his time as an MSc student at the University of Bristol in the UK. Raphael’s insights were inspired by a resurgence of Black activism across the city over the summer of 2020, which he engaged with both as a member of the Black community and as a student. Raphael highlighted the discomforts that academia posed on Black communities in the UK, through which institutionalised definitions of what it meant to be black and to research black experiences are imposed from an ontology of whiteness. Research in the UK, for example, focuses on Black experiences within educational settings with a view to ‘improve’ those spaces and make them more inclusive for the Black population. Such research, Raphael argues, “assumed being in university spaces is what Black communities want”.
The notion of decolonial hybridity was employed to describe the position from which Raphael balanced his navigation and utilisation of academia as a means of furthering his qualifications with his responsibilities and sensibilities to his own position as a member of the Black community. He spoke of the limitations he faced as a researcher - the ethical procedures that allowed him to extract knowledge from his community, its blindness to how research makes people feel; the timeframes within which he had to complete the dissertation; and the ritualistic, hierarchical procedures that shaped the scope and potential of the research itself by defining the potential for more in-depth research as something better suited to a doctoral thesis.
A number of critical debates were raised throughout the day, however, many were also raised in retrospect as we combed back through the day’s proceedings and noted some of the key themes that emerged across presentations and discussions. We co-created a mosaic of collective action strategies that embody struggles of the Tricontinental; we problematised the positionality of the activist-researcher; we scrutinised the trade-off between local and transnational; we took on different perspectives to examine the particularities of ‘youth’ activism; we played with temporality and other (hegemonic) mnemonic devices; and we felt with curiosity the absences that cut through our debates, particularly that of gender. Ultimately, we have walked away with the sense that solidarity in the context of Tricontinentalism needs to be reconceptualised with a fine-toothed comb. To continue this fascinating and enriching debate we have proposed a special issue of Bandung: Journal of the Global South, entitled Narratives and Artefacts of Global Cold War Social Movements.
Suggested citation: Grimaldi, A. & Gukelberger, S. (2022) (Re)activations of Tricontinentalism in the Past and in the Present. Human Rights from the Global South Blog. 20th April 2022.