Anne Garland Mahler, "From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity" (Duke UP, 2018)

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Head to quints.com/newbooks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's qu-in-c-e.com/newbooks for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/newbooks Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to new books network. I'm Shereka Crawford your host. Today I'm with Dr. Anne Garland, Moller. She is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. We're here to discuss her book from Tri-continental to the Global South, Race, Radicalism and Transnational Solidarity, published by Duke University Press in 2018. Anne Garland. Thank you for having me. Thank you for agreeing to do the interview. I'm happy to be here. I appreciate it. Let's begin with you sharing a bit about your intellectual and professional background. Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm an associate professor at the University of Virginia. I have an MA and PhD from Emory University in 20th and 21st century Latin American cultural studies. In fact, I also have a BA from the University of Pittsburgh in that field. But I would describe my doctoral education more broadly as a training in a comparitous approach to the histories of civil rights, decolonization and radical movements in the Americas. It was a really interdisciplinary kind of comparative training. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and have always been interested in the history of racial justice struggles. And it was in college that I got interested in thinking about those questions more hemispherically across postplantation economies in the Americas. So when I went on to graduate studies, I wanted to do scholarship that was essentially hemispheric in comparison nature. But since so much of that work kind of comes from a US focus that then looks southward, I wanted to have the training in Latin American studies that would allow me to frame things a bit differently. So it was those interests that eventually led to the dissertation that became my first book from the Tri-Continual to the Global South. So tell us a little bit about the Tri-Continental movement, if you will. How did you become exposed to that group? And what are the origins of its solidarity? So the Tri-Continental was a movement that formed in January 1966 when delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations in Africa, Asia and the Americas came together in Havana, Cuba, and they formed an alliance against military and economic imperialism. The Tri-Continental organization, it's called the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, or the Ospaal. It really became known for these striking artistically innovative films, posters and magazines that it published in English, Spanish, French, and sometimes Arabic and distributed around the world. This is a movement that played a pivotal role in generating international solidarity with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, as well as with the anti-partite struggle. Its vision of global resistance, it was shaped by its foundations of Black internationalist thought and by the close involvement of African-American and African-Americans activists. The Ospaal has been in existence and continued to circulate materials up until its closure in June 2019. It had just a profound impact on creating a discourse and aesthetics of radicalism for movements around the world. In the book, I traced the presence of this discourse of Tri-Continentalism in a wide array of radical texts in the 1960s, but also in present-day political posters and such. In terms of, you asked about my interests, like how I became interested in this movement, this really started when I was a doctoral student. I had kind of two major interests that led me in this direction. On the one hand, I was interested in the relationship between the Cuban Revolution and African-American activists from the U.S. South, people like Robert F Williams and some of the cultural production that came out of that exchange, that sort of internationalist element of the Black Freedom struggle was simply, you know, it was just not something that I had been taught growing up. So I was interested in that. On the other hand, I was very interested in the field of Post-Colonial Studies, which has been framed mostly through the history of Afro-Asian alliances, and I was interested in Latin America's kind of marginal position within that field. So as I began tracing African-American and Cuban relations in the 1960s, I started to understand these exchanges as part of the much larger framework of the Tri-Continental Movement. And the more that I, you know, looked at what was at that time an understudied movement, the more I was convinced of the ways that the Tri-Continental transformed our thinking on power and political subjectivity. So I was reading the work of, you know, Robert Young, but senior Rodriguez, Cynthia Young, Vijay Prasad, and many others. And I was doing the archival work and the project just kind of exploded from there and became about this broader global movement. That was one of the areas that struck me and attracted me about your work as a historian who teaches world history, but trained as a Latin American as I think of mid-20th century transnational solidarities as you've kind of laid it out in 1955, the Afro-Asian conference at Bendung, which for our listeners who might want to check out after hearing this interview, one done by, or done with Christopher Lee, who wrote, "Making a World After Empire, the Bendung, and it's political afterlives, it made me curious to understand in what ways the Tri-Continental conference, the members of Osval differed and were similar to the Afro-Asian solidarities that came out of the Bendung conference." Sure. So yeah, I mean in terms of its origins, you know, in Osval, in Tri-Continental materials, they always talk about the 1955 Bendung conference as the origin point. In fact, its most immediate origins were in the Afro-Asian people solidarity organization, the AAPSO, which had its roots in Bendung. So essentially when Cuba was ousted from the organization of American states, it approached the AAPSO about broadening to Latin America. And these were movements that were intended to provide an alternative power block to the Cold War Division between the US and the Soviet Union. And the Bendung conference has received much more scholarly attention. Christopher Lee's work, as you mentioned, has been really important for documenting that history. Christopher Lee and I just recently published a piece together that maybe your readers would be interested in. But we could kind of take the Bendung and Tri-Continental moments as two major cornerstones of Cold War anti-colonialism separated by an ocean in a decade. And they're different, quite different. I mean, Bendung was a meeting of recently decolonized in decolonizing nation states. It was state representatives who were addressing an experience of European colonialism. Their concerns were about political and economic independence, nonviolent international relations, nuclear disarmament, etc. The Tri-Continental was much more overtly opposed to the US government. It was theorizing intersections between histories of European colonialism and US finance capitalism. And for this reason, the Latin American region played a central role. It was a militant movement. Its delegations were not necessarily heads of state. A lot of them were coming from organizations that were in the process of fighting their own governments. And it also included movements from within imperialist countries like the United States. And I should say it was much more focused. The Tri-Continental was much more focused on Black liberation and specifically on the African-American freedom struggle. But even with all of these differences, the transnational anti-colonial solidarity established through the Bendung meeting is something that the Tri-Continental will uphold and will extend into the Americas. Yeah, I was struck by your explanation and then your further analysis of what you argue as the Tri-Continental sort of articulated post-colonial transnational positionality by which they viewed Cold War and Empire through the experiences of Black liberation or African-Americans in particular. and how that in turn transformed their own thinking about race or the way that they kind of presented color and race. Would you mind talking a little bit about the ways in which they're focused on the African-American experience in the US and more broadly kind of anti-black conditions around the world, shape this kind of ospa or tricontinental positionality on issues of race and color? Absolutely, and this is really I think the crux of the book and like I said it was kind of what first got me interested in this movement. So even though it was particularly critical of the United States, the understanding of imperialism and tricontinental materials was not necessarily tied to the actions of anyone nation. So tricontinental bulletin, for example, quote, "Stokley Carmichael" saying, "Imperialism is an exploiting octopus whose tentacles extend from Mississippi and Harlem to Latin America, the Middle East, South Africa and Vietnam." So that was kind of the vision that they had. And the logic behind the tricontinental is that the resistance to this global monster has to be equally global, right? So this is what Che Guevara and his 1967 message to the tricontinental talks about as we the exploited people of the world. And so among these exploited people of the world, the tricontinental, especially in its first 10 years, consistently centered African-Americans and consistently presented the Jim Carousel as a microcosm of global empire. You know, the idea was like if imperialism is an octopus covering the earth, that African-Americans are fighting within the guts of the monster, right? Within the belly of the beast was the idea. And so through a focus on the Jim Carousel, these materials often use the Jim Carousel categories of white and colored, and especially images of white American policemen and black American protesters, and they used white policemen to signify global imperial oppression, and an African-American subjectivity to stand in for all the exploited people of the world. And so in tricontinental materials, the term colored people, sometimes it's colored and exploited people, was used to refer to a shared ideological position, where color is an umbrella for a politics of anti-imperialism, but it does not necessarily refer to the race of the people's included under that umbrella. So on the one hand, the focus on the African-American freedom struggle was a way of talking about power in a global sense, right, where people living within imperialist countries are negatively impacted by global capitalism in much the same ways. And also the use of that Jim Carousel category of color becomes a way of talking about a broadly defined political revolutionary subjectivity that foregrounds black struggles, and then that opens on to a broader collectivity from there. Later during the 70s and 80s, apartheid South Africa becomes the microcosm of the tricontinental movement in the way that the Jim Carousel was early on. So you have that same black white division that's used to signify, you know, struggle between global empire and all the exploited peoples of the world, and they start to make comparisons between the US South and South Africa and then the southern cone of Latin America. And there's this kind of pseudo-geographical notion of the South that emerges. And eventually the tricontinental just starts using the term global South to refer to its political community. You do a really great job early on both in the introduction in the in the first chapter sort of laying out what you've just done here, providing that context, both the antecedents, whether we're talking about the Afro-Asian conference of Mendoong, or if we're talking about wider anti-black international political movements and figures from more well-known people like Du Bois or Richard Wright or Franz Fanon. But I was excited to be introduced to a person who seems sort of central to the tricontinental movement in Osval, Walthario, Garbonel. Can you tell us a little bit about who he was and how he was connected to the tricontinental movement? Absolutely, yeah. This is somebody who I don't know whose work I think is just really important. He was a a Black Cuban scholar and historian. He was the Cuban revolutionary government's ambassador to Tunisia. And essentially the tricontinental, I mean this was initially his idea. He started pushing for a tricontinental conference as early as 1959. And you know, one of the things that's important to say here is that when we talk about the dialogue with the tricontinental's dialogue with the African-American freedom movement, and there's a lot of examples of, you know, exchange, right? This was a conversation back and forth. You know, this comes out of a longer history of the Castro government's outreach to African-Americans. And you know, I want to comment here on the dissonance between the fiercely anti-racist rhetoric that we see in tricontinental materials and in the Castro government's domestic discourse on race. And I devote a lot of space in the book to teasing out that dissonance. So, you know, as you well know, Shureka, you know, the Cuban Revolution has long presented itself as this kind of like final realization of the island's long struggle for Black freedom. But Cuba's post-revolutionary racial politics have generally been more like a combination of, you know, the myth of racial democracy, you know, a lot of Latin American countries that kind of veils inequalities, but then also like Marxist exceptionalism where socialist reforms have supposedly eradicated racial inequality. So, you know, this, basically the idea is that Black Cubans don't really need to organize their home racial discrimination because we don't have that problem, right? So, you know, this meant that while the Castro government supported Black power and Black liberation abroad, it was often really uncomfortable with Black political organizing at home. And that's something that African-Americans who go to Cuba pick up on really quickly and Carbonell, Waltario Carbonell is a really good example of this hypocrisy that I'm talking about. So, he wrote a book in 1961 that was censored until 2005, which denounced the Castro government's kind of colorblind discourse. He said that it reproduced the nationalist rhetoric that had legitimized the continuation of white power in Cuba post independence. And because of this book, he became persona non grata and was persecuted by the Cuban state. So, it was really important to me to revive his, you know, that this was his idea, even though, you know, he was, he pretty much erased from this history. Yeah, it's actually striking in the ways that you talk about later in the book how Cuba managed to maintain for a considerable period of time, this duality or this tension over internationally and publicly kind of denouncing anti-Black racism, showing solidarity with Black liberation movements, particularly as we talk about Cuba in the international arena on the African continent, for example, and domestically the suppression of race-based organizing, as you've pointed out here, that he becomes a figure that you want to know more about, that we haven't fully been able to before your work really kind of tease out how he was able to already see those contradictions and speak to that. To that point, you do a number of things in the book that are fascinating and you take the tricontinental solidarity, not just the member states or the individuals who helped to craft ospal, but the ways in which it becomes sort of diffused and taken up and articulated among other communities. And I wanted to have you talk a little bit about the young lords in New York and other New Yorker recon figures who you argue adopted. Some of the, I don't know, effective solidarity strategies of the tricontinental just introduce, you know, our listeners to the young lords in the context of New York and in how the message of the tricontinental becomes promoted by some of their members. Sure. So, you know, as you said, I mean, one of the main things I'm trying to do is talk about how tricontinentalism as an ideology doesn't really fully belong to the Cuban state, right? It's formed through these exchanges with all of these movements. It's circulating prior to the 1966 meeting, you know, and even as like African-American activists eventually distance themselves from Castro and from Cuba, the discourse of tricontinentalism continues to surface in their writings. So, the book dedicates a chapter to the young lords and to the New York movement to Oswald materials on the young lords and the presence of tricontinentalism in this cultural production as a kind of case study of how tricontinentalism circulated in radical movements outside of materials directly produced by the Oswald. The young lords for anybody, you know, who's not familiar, you know, this was a group, you know, kind of similar to the Black Panther Party that came up among Puerto Rican activists living in Chicago and New York in the 1960s and 70s. It was largely, um, after a Puerto Rican activists, but you know, had a broader membership that included a large percentage of African-American activists. If you're interested in the young lords, I mean, I would certainly point you to the chapter in my book, but I would really point you to Johanna Fernandez's work. She's really kind of the authority on the young lords movement. But in the book, you know, I'm especially looking at the Puerto Rican and African-American solidarity found in young lords and closely related New York in text. So this includes works by Pedro Pietri, Felipe Luciano, Denise Oliver, Belez, the young lords newspaper Palante, the film, El Pueblo Celevanta, which is an incredible film. And I study how the Jim Crousal became the lens through which New Yorkan writers took up structural inequalities in their particular context as part of a larger pattern of imperial power. So this position is frequently summarized in materials written by the young lords through there. They would spell America as like America, KKKA. This was kind of a shorthand for the way they talked about this. And like in tricotininal materials, the racial oppression of the Jim Crousal, you know, they use it as a microcosm of an unequal power structure, not only in the U.S., not only in Puerto Rico, but around the globe. And I also look in that chapter at the young lords, gay and lesbian caucus, and their sort of more open position on sexuality. As yet another example of ways that tricotininalist movements did not necessarily align directly with the Cuban states positions at this time. Particularly in the period of what is it that the 1960s and 70s where there was really a kind of a hardened, you know, rule on these kinds of communities within Cuba precisely. One of the points that I think comes away, I should rekind of articulate it. One of the claims and I think rationales for your work that you make in the book over and over and you get to it towards the end of it is that there's much that we can learn about kind of the present moment in terms of anti-black racism movements, such as Black Lives Matter, but you know, various other sorts that have kind of cropped up all around the world, that there's something we can take from the tricontinental moment. What are those things? What can be learned by studying this particular strategy of solidarity, but also denouncing of anti-black racism, and how can it be used to kind of enrich and further what has been a really transformative moment in the 21st century? Yeah, I mean, I talk about how, you know, we are seeing kind of a revival of key elements of tricontinalism and contemporary social movements in the Americas. We're seeing a revival in some ways and not in others, right? So you see the legacy of tricontinalism in a lot of contemporary political posters. You see it in kind of like political mashup remix videos on YouTube. They're really reminiscent of the newsreels. There's kind of the horizontalist praxis of alter globalization movements that are is emphasizing lateral dialogues and solidarities among subaltern groups. So there's a lot of returns of tricontinalism, but I think there's also things that we could really learn from looking back to this. I think that its most important contribution was the way that it brought together anti-capitalist and anti-racist movements in a way that centered Black struggles and that was focused on a fight against racial capitalism. Much of the critique of the movement for Black lives has been focused on, you know, understandably, on reforming the state security apparatus. But I think the international is perspective and the focus on the intersection between racial violence and global capital flows is certainly something to draw from. And there are a lot of, there are some important moves in the, in the larger movement for Black lives. There's some really important moves in this direction. So for example, I talk about the work of O'Palt-Tumetti with the Black Alliance for just immigration and they have this notion of transformational solidarity, which I think is just a concept that's strikingly similar to tricontinalism. And it's basically about, you know, centering Black struggles and then opening outward from there. In some ways, the tricontinental solidarity, movement or Ospaal, you know, specifically has been silenced or erased. And you and I both know within the field of Latin American studies and in people who work on race in particular, it's been a long trajectory of discussions about the erasure of race and the silencing of race. How might we understand kind of why more of us were not aware of the tricontinental solidarity? Like, how do we come to terms with the fact that it has a legacy, but not one in which has been more powerfully preserved? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think, I think there are several ways of answering that question. I mean, you have disillusionment with Cuba's repression of intellectual freedoms. You know, a lot of people, like when I first started working on this project, a lot of people in Cuban studies would kind of be like, oh, more Cuban state propaganda, interesting, you know, and so one of the things I really wanted to make clear was that the Cuban state doesn't really fully control this movement and that this is something that really precedes the way that the Cuban state uses it. But you also have the severe weakening of the left and the Americas in the 70s and 80s that I think contributes. But I think, as you said, a lot of this is more about the structure of academia. And I think one of the more significant reasons is how Cold War anti-colonial discourses became preserved within the academic field of postcolonial studies, which has tended to focus on the former African and Asian colonies at Bandun, and which has tended, you know, tended to overlook the Latin American context. There's also this issue, as you mentioned, of Latin American studies being very much framed in a kind of area studies framework, where there's not necessarily those global connections being made. Also, as you mentioned, the marginal position of black studies historically within Latin American studies, I think all of these things combine. But within postcolonial studies, when the Tri-Continental has been included as part of the history of postcolonial studies like in Robert Young's work, which has been really important for mine. It's often been a pretty cursory discussion. And I think that the Tri-Continental had a very different approach to its subjectivity than one that's based on a condition of postcoloniality. But even with this erasure, as I mentioned, I think, you know, it's very much been a part of our collective subconscious. I talk about, you know, shepherd fairies, poster shepherd fairy who made, you know, who did the Barack Obama hope poster. Some of shepherd fairies posters are direct copies of Tri-Continental posters. So it's with us, even though, you know, a lot of us have forgotten about it. That's one of the things that our listeners are unfortunately unable to capture in our discussion, but definitely within your book, in terms of the material that you draw on, much of its posters, right? Could you describe maybe one or, or, you know, that you think is pretty striking, maybe even the one that's the cover of your book, in terms of getting a sense of how the visual representation of this kind of transnational solidarity was presented. Oh goodness, describing an image, okay. That's, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. No, but the babies were, you know, they're really striking. I mean, if you go, if you go to Google images and put in O-O-S-P-A-A-L posters or Tri-Continental posters, you're going to see a bunch of these and you might recognize some of these images, but we're talking, you know, flat, bold colors. We're talking really simple designs, very much influenced by Cubism, and, and, you know, you can see the, the kind of reverberations of these images. So, one, I do an analysis of a really famous poster of Michael Brown up against posters that were, O-S-P-A-L posters that were made after the assassinations of a Milkar Cabral and Patrice Lemumba, and it's just really striking, even the colors that are used, the kind of, the, even the directions that Michael Brown and these, and in these two other images, these assassinated leaders are looking at it, and, you know, pretty much exactly the same. So, rather than me trying to describe it, I think I would encourage our readers to, to go look at these and, and I think, you know, you'll like what you see. Absolutely, absolutely, but yeah, they're absolutely striking. And Garland, what are you working on right now? Well, oh, and I will say before I talk about what I'm working on, there's been some really amazing exhibits. I've participated in some exhibits in Chicago and New York of these posters. So definitely check them out. But right now I'm on an ACLS, I'm on an ACLS fellowship this year. I'm working on a really exciting new book project. It's about a network, it's got some overlap with this project. It's about a network of politically radical activists and artists in the American hemisphere and around the world in the 1920s and 30s. It's primarily focused on the anti-imperialist league of the Americas, called Lavela. It was created in 1925 in Mexico City. This is a movement that had a number of well-known people involved, the Cuban activists Julio Antonio Meña, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, Javier Guerrero, the Italian-American photographer Tina Moldotti, and then lesser-known people like Afro-Cuban organizer Sandalia Hongco or the Afro-Chinese Cuban poet Rihino Pedro So. So within two years of the founding of this movement in 1925, they joined with organizations from 40 nations at the 1927 Brussels Anticolonial Conference. And there these Lavela organizers interacted with US Black intellectuals and with anti-colonial leaders from African Asia. And so the book is really looking at how these exchanges impacted debates in radical circles in the Americas, specifically on the subjects of Black and Indigenous labor, on immigrant rights, and on racial policing. So it has a similar focus in bringing Latin American history into a much more global conversation and in highlighting the contributions of Latin American and especially Black Latin American activists and intellectuals to these key historical movements that have been so important for the history of post-colonial studies. Well congratulations on the ACLS fellowship and I certainly will be looking forward to reading your subsequent work whether in article chapters or book form. And indeed is a filling of in of a gap that's still quite wide in terms of connecting Latin America as you pointed out to these kind of more global currents beyond just the hemisphere which has been I think widely, you know, covered in existing scholarship. And Garland, thank you for being interviewed today. Thank you. It was my pleasure. You can find a link to from Tricontinental to the global South, race, radicalism, and transnational solidarity on the new book's network page until next time.