Online Symposium: Remembering a Tricontinental Past

9th April 2022

Remembering a Tricontinental Past explores (re)iterations of tricontinentalism – solidarity and social movements based on the concept of a collective Latin American, Asian, and African identity. Using this concept and political project as a point of departure, this symposium will be used to understand how testimonies, documents, photos, political ephemera, and repertoires of contention of the past are called upon in the present.

The narratives, discourses, and artefacts that provide a window into the past and the ways in which they are called upon matter when it comes to understanding the situated knowledges and collective identities of activism today. Social movements employ a variety of cultural practices, encompassing a universe of forms of expression through interactions, rhetoric, embodied modes of communication, and other signs and symbols.

So 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? How did activists of the past handle the visual and the textual differently, and how do activists of the present relate to them?

To answer these questions, we propose an inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogue that describes, applies, compares, and analyses the several methodological, theoretical, and conceptual frameworks at our disposal. We situate institutional, organisational, and social collective memories of past and present social activism, as well as the memorial labour they require, and we trace complex webs of strategies and narrative frameworks through the textual, visual, and embodied artefacts that shaped them.