Unknown Speaker 0:00

Hello and

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welcome. My name is Jennifer Sheehan and on behalf of UCLA International Institute, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to today's event. This event is part of a year long series inspired by the groundbreaking movement for black lives, and the urgent political issues it raises about systemic racism and institutional violence, both in the US and around the world. Our inaugural event last night last month, which featured professors Brenda Stevenson and Deborah Thomas discuss the Black Lives Matter movement in the historical context of slavery, segregation and abolition movements in the US and their complex after lives and countries like Jamaica. Today's distinguished speakers, professors Christine Hong and Ann garlin Mahler turn our attention to the Americas and the Asia and Asia and the Pacific, and discuss how movements for racial and decolonial liberation were shaped by the dynamics of Cold War militarism, US empire building and global racial capitalism. Before we get to the main event, I wanted to offer some brief words of acknowledgement and gratitude. First and foremost, UCLA and the International Institute, acknowledge the gabrielino Tongva peoples as the traditional lancair caretakers of Tovar, Los Angeles Basin in the south Channel Islands, and are grateful to have the opportunity to work for the Turlock at home indigenous peoples in this place. As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to home nuke that Tom ancestors, he hyrum elders and EU income our relatives relations past, present and emerging at the International Institute. We thank the leadership of Vice Provost for international studies and Global Engagement Cindy fan, and Senior Associate Vice Provost and director of the International Institute, Chris Erickson, who have enthusiastically who had enthusiastically supported this initiative from the onset. I also want to thank my extraordinary colleagues and fellow conspirators, Jorge Martorano Laurie Hart, Robin Derby, Shana Potts. It believed us califone knows all didn't young and Erica Anja for their vision and hard work and putting together this exciting series, which is really an unprecedented collaboration across the international institutes many centers and programs. Our deepest thanks also to the dedicated staff at the International Institute, Catherine Paul, Peggy McCarney, kayam and Tessa glue, Alex ju, Oliver Chen, Chloe yoga, and Steven Acosta, whose essential support and expertise make events like today possible. Today's event is co presented by the Center for Korean studies directed by non Haley, and the program and Caribbean studies directed by Jorge Martorano. Our co sponsors include the Asian American Studies Center, the Bunche center for African American Studies, and the department's of Asian American Studies and Spanish and Portuguese. Our format will include 20 minute presentations from each of our distinguished speakers, followed by a moderated q&a, and we ask that attendees submit their questions on the webinars q&a, and then we'll address them after the talks. A recording of the event will also be posted on the international Institute's website. for time sake, we have posted the full bios of our distinguished speakers and moderators in the chat. I am thrilled to briefly introduce our speaker Professor Christine Hong, associate professor in the literature department and director of the critical race and ethnic studies program at UC Santa Cruz. In addition to her extraordinary, extraordinary scholarship, and transnational Asian American Studies, African American literature and black freedom studies and us Warren Empire. She is actively involved in the national campaign to end the Korean War and the Korea Policy Institute. Her talk today gulag in quotes North Korea question mark. Black antifascist critique of us police action in Korea draws from her acclaimed new book, a violent piece. Race us militarism and the cultures of democratization In Cold War, Asia and the Pacific. And that's just hot off the press at Stanford University. Press. Ok. So now I want to talk to Jorge to introduce and garlin Mahler and Cassia Harada.

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Jorge, you're muted St. Louis.

Unknown Speaker 5:09

Yeah, I am a horkheimer turano, the chair of the program on Caribbean studies of the Latin America nice to know. And thank you everybody again for being here on soon. Um, for me it is an honor to introduce Professor angulimala. To all of you. Dr. Mohler obtained her PhD from Emory University and is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia and author of from the Continental to the global south rice, rather radicalism and transnational solidarity published by a book in 2018. It's a wonderful book I recommend to everybody. Professor Mahler. His research examines the histories and artistic production of global radicalism, with a focus on transnational solidarity movements in the Americas. She's the creator and director of the digital publication global South studies, co co coordinator of the internationalism project within the Academy of Global Humanities and critical theory and co editor of the book, the coming time and the global files for coming with the travellish car monographs in progress south south solidarities racial capitalism and political communities community from the Americas to the blob is supported by the 2021 American Council of learned society fellowship. Her presentation is entitled rational capitalism and Solidarity Movement from the Americas to the glava. Thank you and Godwin for being here. And next I want to introduce now, our dear Tatsuya Hirano, who is Associate Professor at the Department of History at UCLA. She's the author of the political of theological imagination, power and popular culture In early modern Japan. A from public by Chico University Press, in his current book project examines the intersection of capitalism and ricin in the making of modern Japanese Imperial nation and its first colony, Professor edano is also a co a co editing a translation volume with Professor gabbing Walker entitled the archive of revolution, Marxist historiography in modern Japan. Thank you guys for being here.

Unknown Speaker 7:29

Christine.

Unknown Speaker 7:34

Let me share my screen. Yeah, there we go. So I want to begin by thanking all the organizers, cats as well for facilitating today's discussion as well as all of the center's staff. So I'll go ahead and begin in the wake of 911 shattered by the prospect of renewed us interventionist war with North Korea, the image of North Korea not simply as a society with prisons, but as an unparalleled police state. In effect, a giant gulag moved onto the global stage as a matter of militarized human rights concern. In the contemporary era, no image has arguably gone further in cementing North Korea's legitimacy.

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ellipse

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as the most obscure target of the war on terror yoke to Iran and Iraq in George W. Bush's Axis of Evil. North Korea emerged as the fence has notic grounds for a neoconservative human rights cottage industry aimed at its collapse. The heady decades that followed 911 would bear witness to the emergence of human rights technologies extensively aimed at free North Koreans from tyranny, including imagery, intelligence, satellite images like this, that were interoperable with technologies of interventionist war. And so you can think here about how the principal Ways of Knowing North Korea in the contemporary period are imminent and humans, imagery, intelligence and human intelligence and these ways of knowing North Korea were also constituted the flawed epistemological basis that the US on which the Bush administration made a case for war in Iraq. And so you can also see that this so called hidden gulag is paradoxically hyper visible, and so far as human rights in the West can be understood as anti communism by another name. As legal scholar Samuel moyn has argued it is uncertainty prising that the gang of virtue that mobilized under the North Korean human rights banner. Us soft power institutions, cold warriors, quote human rights advocates hawks across the aisle. Anti communist evangelicals in South Korea and the Korean diaspora and North Korean defectors consistently argued against food aid and other humanitarian measures, while advocating for for defied sanctions, military intervention, and advanced plans for refugee camps to house leading, fleeing North Koreans after an externally triggered regime collapse. And so here we might recall the words of Adrian Hong, the Korean American son of Korean missionaries who found Korean immigrant missionaries who founded the organization in the immediate post 911 period. Liberty in North Korea, it was actually originally called liberation in North Korea or link. And what he stated was North Korea is not a failed state, it is on another level entirely. It's a staggering system entirely built and mastered for the express purpose of propagating human suffering and ensuring the continued exploitation of the people so that very few can benefit. This is what he said. So the the Manichaean geopolitical imaginary of North Korean human rights could be summed up as tyranny, their freedom here, but we can go even further. Debbie MDS nuclear proliferation over the top defense spending, their domestic surveillance, political imprisonment, militarized borders, religious intolerance, hunger, they're geared toward regime change, a super session by whatever means of the vile there with a kinder, gentler here. Human Rights Advocates calling for North Korea's freedom frequently pitch the vast growth potential of a post collapse North Korea brightened by a neoliberal agenda and a 2011 article in foreign policy Hong's is Adrian Hong, contributed to the speculative fever around North Korean regime change quote, with the right inputs in North Korea free of the Kim regime would bring about opportunities for economic development, investment and trade and quote, although link has since disavowed Hong, who early in 2019, as part of a murky organization called free chosen, carried out a raid against the North Korean embassy in Spain, it is worth dwelling on how his human rights agenda has evolved as his actions to topple the North. The North Korean leadership grew bolder his rhetoric shifted. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, the writer Suki Kim, and for those of you who know her writing, you know that she has long been a merchant of North Korean pathology describes Hong Kong as offering a single word explanation of his organization's goal abolition.

Unknown Speaker 13:26

And so you can see here that he says that the goal of his organization is abolition, if recent times have seen the mainstreaming of abolition ongs, opportunistic seizure of the term myelitis to its rhetorical perversion specific to the post 911 neoconservative North Korean human rights agenda deployed as part of an a historical jargon of power. It fails its signally fails to account for the carceral logic behind unavailing us interventionist war, rendering illegible the structural violence perpetrated in multidirectional ways by Imperial nations like the United States. And here I would just note that this is this year 2020 is the 70th year of the unresolved Korean War. This is a war that has yet to be ended. It is, in the words of Bruce Cummings our longest are the United States is longest forever war. North Korea's post Cold War image as the world's most heinous police state requires is I contend in this talk critical contextualization against the early Cold War us police action that place North Korea in the US war machines crosshairs. I reached back to the mid 20th century when the United States emerged as a global police power in order to excavate a Black radical critique of anti imperialist organizing around us intervention in Korea, black anti fascism, both during World War Two and throughout the Cold War, served as a regulatory lens with regard to the centrality of warfare to the political economy of the United States. It just closed not just the identity, but also the fascism of us war and police power. By delving into the archives of the Civil Rights Congress, a black anti fascist organization, I want to dwell on the linkages between the policeman's bullet in the United States and us police action in Korea. So presented by Paul Robeson to the United Nations in 1951. The Civil Rights Congress or CRC petition we charged genocide, principally sought to make Jim Crow and the violence of lynching legible as a crime within the supranational framework of human rights, thus indicting us criminality on the world stage. And you can see here I excerpted part of Robeson speech and he gave a speech on June 28 1950, at Madison Square Garden, and as a speech, you know, basically critiquing us intervention in the Korean War. As a result of this kind of anti war peace agitation. The State Department seized his passport and this was just part of a concerted national security campaign to neutralize black radicals like Paul Robeson.

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Yet in a moment in which the United States was waging a ruthless war of intervention in Korea, a war in which the United States ruled disguise perpetrating what Bruce Cummings is called a bombing Holocaust below. This petition insisted on the structural correlation between us domestic and foreign policy construing racism within the United States to be the domestic expression of a global pattern of us imperialism. As William Paterson and other petition authors reasoned, racist violence and economic exploitation in the United States would beget more of the same as it projected its war power abroad. So I want to read from we charged genocide this 1951 petition, we Negro petitioners whose communities have been laid waste, whose homes have been burned and looted, whose children have been killed, whose woman have been raped have noted with peculiar for the genocidal doctrines and actions of the American white supremacist have already been exported to the colored people of Asia. We solidly warn that a nation which practices genocide against its own nationals, may not be long deterred if it has the power from genocide elsewhere, making a case for to fronted genocide. The petition continued jellied gasoline in Korea and the linters fagot at home are conducted in more ways than that both result in death by fire. The linter cannot murder unpunished and unreviewed without so encouraging the bomber that the peace of the world and the lives of millions are endangered. So in a moment in which the United States was waging what Truman euphemistically dubbed to police action, the morphology of lynching had shifted as a CRC petition a plane from the linters noose to the policeman's bullet, if widely dismissed as procedural double speak away to paper over Truman's deployment of the US military without a congressional declaration of war. The shuttleq police action is critically retrieved clarifies the carceral logic of over 70 years of us intervention is war against North Korea. And I just want to mention that several years ago, I was speaking with the big new siano who was one of the co founders of the Young Lords in New York City. And you know, I was speaking to him about this and he immediately got it and he essentially said, and I'm paraphrasing here that it was as if the United States had surrounded North Korea with a scaled up version of a SWAT team and shouted, come on out with your hands up. And I also want to mention The South Korean documentary filmmaker, Kindle one whose film sound fun it's repatriation details the political incarceration of long term unconverted prisoners in South Korea. The decades long effort to brutalize these prisoners into renouncing North Korea, he argues, was is akin to the isolation imposed on North Korea, as a result of over several decades of aggressive US policy. As Kim puts it, quote, by refusing to sign a non aggression pact, the United States must also shared the blame. The US has economic sanctions and threats of war against the North, remind me of the conversion scheme against the prisoners, just as the scheme failed to break the prisoners, American threads will fail to break the norm.

Unknown Speaker 21:04

So I want to think here about the lines of solidarity that are implied in the structural critique of the Civil Rights Congress petition. And to realize that this critique, this sort of two fronted sort of genocidal charge against the United States emerged, in part out of an anti fascist, no you that bears revisiting and here I'm speaking about Los Angeles in the 1940s and early 1950s. At the height of the McCarthy era, Los Angeles was home to the local chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, as well as a bilingual Korean English newspaper called Tony Shamoon, or Korean independence, whose editorial policy was playing, quote, stop the word Korea oust cementery and tell all powers outside Korea hands off. And it was also home to the LA Committee for the protection of the foreign born. Many of these people who protested us actions in Korea were lined up for deportation. And all of these organizations protested not only us intervention is war in Korea, but also political policing in the United States. And just want to demonstrate this is North Korean propaganda that was distributed on the battlefields of the Crimean War. And you can see that it's addressed to Negro soldiers. And basically, this was this pamphlet to it actually takes wholesale, and it's a multi page pamphlet, language from the civil rights Congress petition, the membership and the leadership of the Civil Rights Congress. This is to say we're reading Tony cimon. They Moreover, we're organizing against the wack, persecution and deportation of Korean immigrants who edited that anti imperialist publication, and they sought to expose the genocidal relationship between anti black lynching domestically. And us intervention is war in Korea. And so here, you could see that in these, the publication cimon, as well as this leaflet, that there's a structural homology that is raised between the racialized war target and the racial profile. And so here, you could see how black radical critique in this moment as well as North Korean anti imperialist critique, converge, the linkage between us imperialist aggression abroad and its counter insurgent violence against domestic populations was clear a domestic populations that were deemed to be enemies was clear. To two within both traditions, it was basically the linkage was fascism. And so I just want to in the interest of time to show you that there is a kind of afterlife to this to the Black Panther Party with the anti imperialist delegation. The first stop was North Korea and you can see Eldridge Cleaver here in the publication on the cover of the publication Black Panther. You can also see that he I took this is an excerpt at the bottom from Eldridge cleavers introduction to a publication that was called jus che.

Unknown Speaker 24:37

Yeah, so I want to just say I'm just dwelling on this critique of us fascism as a self exculpatory discourse wielded by the capitalist bloc. The Cold War catchphrase totalitarianism served ideologically, to a strange fascism from its genesis and location and industrial capitalism and to yoke it in stirred with communism, thus evacuating fascism, meaning and warping the clarity of the anti fascist critique of us militarism, precisely as the US war power assumed unprecedented infrastructural form around the globe, following World War Two, and we can think here of the US national security state, the military industrial complex to Empire basis and the permanent war economy. And so, I want to close by saying that I really appreciate this opportunity to begin having much needed contemporary direct dialogue around the interlocking nature of us police and war power, and by extension, the criticality of anti capitalism and anti imperialism to the abolitionist struggle. But I also want to say that far more than a legacy of the Cold War, US militarism persists, unabated today, get absent a ready idiom of international solidarity, that accounts for the multi directionality of its violence. Absolutely. This is to say, the trenchant critique that anti fascism enabled. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 26:29

All right, I'm going to pull up my presentation. Okay, um, first, I just want to thank UCLA International Institute, dude, the organizers and sponsors, and especially Jorge and Jennifer and Nami for inviting me, and to kutsu for moderating. I'm honored to be able to speak alongside Christine Hong, and I'm grateful that you all have provided this space to think about the long arc and international nature of racial justice work. In 2018, as Jorge mentioned, I published my first book from the tri continental to the global south. I'm working on a new project that moves backwards historically to the interwar years. But this new project has some inherent connections to the tri continental books. So I'm going to try to bridge these two together today, talking mostly about the new project and then a bit about the tri continental at the end.

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See if I can get this to work. Here we go.

Unknown Speaker 27:53

Um, so in June 20 1840, children stood on the steps of the New York offices of ice holding signs that read I am a child. The signs created by artists column and dosa to protest the detention of migrant children and the separation of families at the border. Clearly recall the recognizable purchase placards of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, and which Martin Luther King Jr. was actively involved in the days leading up to his assassination. This is one of many political actions in recent years that draw links between the logics of anti black racism and anti immigrant nativism. And this speaks to an increasing consciousness around the central role of immigrant rights in a larger struggle for racial justice. within the United States, organizations like the black, the black Alliance for just immigration, and the docu black network have been leading voices in framing and intersectional anti racist politics and with intersectional. I'm obviously referring to Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, his work. These movements have emerged not only within the broader movement for black lives, but also within a renewed moment of transnational solidarity politics, facilitated by infant innovations and information and communication technologies that we've witnessed since at least the 2008 occupy protests, but that has deeper roots in Latin America's Madame Rosada of the late 1990s. Today, I want to frame this contemporary moment of intersectional and transnational solidarity politics by thinking about histories that proceeded and specifically by revisiting two key solidarity movements of the 20th century that were centered in the American continent. Both these movements the anti imperialist League of the Americas of the 1920s and 30s, and the tri continental that began in the 1960s conceived of the operation of power through a global frame, and examined the overlapping mechanics of finance capitalism, with earlier histories of European colonization. Ultimately, both movements although with distinct discourses, and aesthetics, aim to bridge a global anti capitalist movement with racial justice, organizing social movements today face particular challenges, like the question of how to navigate the complex relationship between the globalized and networked nature of contemporary power so like the role of transnational corporations and transnational elites, for example, and the locally socio spatial context of inequality and racialization. Beginning with Cedric Robinson's original 1983 formulation of racial capitalism and black Marxism, theories of racial capitalism have attempted to trace how racialization evolves with the development of and changes within the capitalist system. Robinson's work has served as a platform for a wave of scholarship that both expands upon and critiques his theories. drawing attention, for example, to silences on gender and sexuality and to is essential as notions of African culture that he holds up in counterpoint to Marxist traditions. In one very recent example of this scholarship, Sheree Spurgeon, stelly In a July 2020, monthly review article article defines what she calls modern us racial capitalism, a post World War One quote, racially hierarchical political economy, constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labor super exploitation in quote. On the other hand, there are scholars like Jody Malamud and Charles Charles Hale, who have theorized a differently articulated racial formation in the post 1970s era that they refer to as neoliberal multiculturalism. Where contemporary racialization is not necessarily based on biological determinism, or on the military occupations that have undergirded the US imperialist model that Teresa Burton Sally's talking about, but on one's access to the multicultural rights of the free market, racialized privilege is ascribed to those who adhere to the protocols of a racialized system of control, or what I will often describes as health regimes acquisition of skills and other techniques of self engineering and capital accumulation. Those who do not adhere to these protocols are ascribed with racialized stigma like backwardness and irrationality. I find it useful to conceive of overlapping and evolving racial regimes. In other words, we are we are in a process of understanding these overlapping racial logics the legacies of colonial modes of domination, which some describe simply as coloniality, versus the neoliberal multiculturalism of late racial capitalism. Just as we're looking for ways to balance our understanding of the globalized nature of contemporary power, with the rescaled, spatial and racial formations that it produces.

Unknown Speaker 32:48

And even as the work on racial capitalism is expanding, so much of this work has focused on the US context and on a US intellectual genealogy, which is something that this series is and the people involved with it with it are obviously pushing against. So I want to go back to earlier examples of transnational political thinking on racial capitalism, focusing especially on those that emerged out of Spanish speaking Latin America. So let's start with the anti imperialist League of the Americas La Liga and game video, Lisa, they want some medicus or LOD law, which was founded in 1925. In Mexico City. There's a really detailed organizational study of law out there by a scholar named Daniel curse Feld that you can check out my I definitely recommend. Ludlow which was largely funded by the Comintern brought together urban trade unions, agrarian organizations, and cultural and artistic groups to combat US and European commercial and military expansion, and eventually the rise of depression Arab nationalism. It was established with the goal of forming a hemispheric Alliance among anti imperialist of Latin American countries with those the United States and a forging a multiracial political community that early on, focused on advancing indigenous struggles, but then expanded to focus on black and immigrant struggles. Its vision was based in the theorisation of a transnational extractive zone to use microdata vamos vitesses term, managed by a form of transnational racial policing. For this reason, it's centered agrarian populations as core to the anti imperialist movement. Since these populations live in the extractive zone, and disproportionately experienced its most negative consequences. Lava eventually grew to include 12 chapters throughout the Americas.

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Among its core leadership were well known artists and intellectuals of the moment like Mexican indigenous knowledge artists have yet to get writer and other Mexican artists like the rotary bed and wt cantos. Us activist virgin Manila Wolf, exiled Cuban pulita political leader who young Dhoni omega An Italian American photographer Tina mobilty, among others. On this screen is the cover of the third issue of its publication and Libertadores deliberate are all the illustrations were done by Have you had to get righto like this one, with the exception of a few that were done by be able to get up. The first issue March 1925, le Bertha Lord explains the creation of Ludlow as the necessary response to the expanding economic and military domination of the United States over Cuba, Panama, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Mexico. In response to this expansion, Latin American radicals must ally with us radicals to form quote, a single anti imperialist continental movement, which can then quote, eventually perhaps save Europe, Asia and Africa as well and quote, so there's a hemispheric vision at the outset. But this hemispheric project is intended to build outwards,

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towards a global one.

Unknown Speaker 35:57

Within two years at the 1927 Congress against colonial oppression and imperialism and for national independence in Brussels, laba members joined with delegates around the world to form the global league against imperialism. Their Latin American radicals would interact with some of the world's foremost anti colonial intellectuals and activists of the 20th century. Although most of the work on this legendary Congress, first that was so foundational to postcolonial studies, most of the work has focused on Afro Asian connections. This moment was extremely important for radicals in the Americas. It is through the Brussels Congress that ludlowe members would reject Latin America's most popular regionalist ideologies like Missy Sahih and spin on many Gunny small for a hemispheric globalism, in which they expanded on hemispheric connections with worker and minority struggles the United States to embrace an interdependency with anti imperialist movements around the world. If the Brussels Congress offered lab organizers the chance to see more clearly the connections between their struggles and those of other colonial contexts, it also helped them to draw deeper connections with non Spanish speaking communities that were closer geographically, like us black activists and organizations from the Francophone and Anglophone Peruvians. Significantly, the encounter with black activists from other contexts in Brussels would inspire a process of expanding love loves initial focus on indigenous struggles to think more critically about black labor, including black migrant labor in the Americas. lagless initial focus on indigenous communities is significant in that it anticipates contemporary critiques of theories of racial capitalism by some Indigenous Studies scholars like when called tart for example, for the way those theories center racial slavery in the role of labor and proletarian is a vision rather than the dispossession at the heart of settler colonialism. But the Brussels Congress is a moment of expansion and lavas vision, and it would also influence largely to theorize white supremacists and fascist ideologies as an integral part of imperialist domination. mandalas move away from Latin American regionalisms allowed it to eventually move beyond the familiar trappings of Latin American racial exceptionalism, which as we all know, you know, celebrates Latin American countries as supposedly racial democracies. In the Latin American resolution from the Brussels Congress published in a new that adored the very first mention of black labor in this publication appears in the phrase quote, imperialist penetration in these countries has exacerbated the inequality faced by indigenous and black people because of the concentration of land. Since black and indigenous people constitute the vast majority of the agrarian population in quote, through this resolution law, Ludlow redefined its anti imperialist program to address anti black discrimination and dispossession as a central part of the extractive economy, identifying indigenous and black communities as key to the worldwide anti imperialist struggle, however, alongside the Latin American resolution, Libertadores, also reprinted the common resolution on the Negro question created at the Brussels Congress. This resolution contained a curious statement regarding Spanish speaking Latin America, it read in Latin America, Negros suffered no special oppression. The cordial relations relations resulting from the social and political equality in the races in these countries prove that there is no inherent antagonism between them and quote. Importantly, when this resolution was reprinted in Spanish, the lava editor editors made revisions to the statement, specifically in the section that discuss Latin America, adding text to the original that offered Cuba and Panama as exceptions to the resolutions general claim about Latin America, but importantly, attributing anti black racism in these places

Unknown Speaker 39:50

to us influence.

Unknown Speaker 39:53

Law was ambiguous position on anti black racism in 1927 is a reflection of itself. They sent theorizing on this issue at this point, as well as a reflection of the absence of Spanish speaking black Latin American delegates in Brussels. These positions, however, would later be fervently critiqued by an afro Cuban activist and llama member named somebody who huncle who will put forth a new resolution on the Negro question in the Americas, one based in his own Afro Latin American subjectivity, and whose influence will very importantly, turn levels focus toward black immigrant labor.

Unknown Speaker 40:36

At two,

Unknown Speaker 40:38

back to back conferences in 1929, the first Latin American communist conference in Buenos itis and the Confederation of Latin American labor unions in Montevideo. clinco, who had been living in exile in Mexico City, where he was working as lagless provisional Secretary pushes forward a conversation about the so called Negro question in Latin America. He presented a little known but foundational texts of black nationalism, where he called for an outreach campaign to black American workers, and insisted on the need to address anti black racism among Latin American radicals. Despite disavows of the existence of this problem by other delegates at the conference. Wanko disagreed with many of the participants strict differentiation between black and indigenous experiences, and he drew comparisons between the racialization of black Latin Americans and those of other racialized populations throughout the hemisphere, such as indigenous, US African Americans, Haitian and West Indian migrant workers and Chinese immigrants. This issue of his identification with migrant workers is I think, especially important. In this speech huncle makes a repeated rhetorical move where he starts out by talking about the conditions of black workers in the USL and then relates that experience to the inequities faced primarily by black workers throughout the continent, explaining that these conditions are especially dire for black migrant workers from Haiti in the West Indies, who are employed by us owned companies in the region. Since the recruitment of migrant workers in the Hispanic and Caribbean was tied to the US sugar industry, when that industry collapsed and the economic crisis that became the Great Depression and anti imperialist discourse arose in Cuba that was often expressed through a nativist anti immigrant rhetoric that was articulated through anti blackness and especially through integration ism, who co condemned the spread of nativism among the working classes and especially among black national citizens towards their black migrant co workers. Jim Crow racism he claimed extends throughout Yankee land and its territories. Those are his words, where US companies and the complicit national bourgeoisie is used nativism to divide and conquer workers drumming up racial hatred, even among black national citizens, like black Cubans toward migrant

Unknown Speaker 42:45

workers.

Unknown Speaker 42:47

Importantly, huncle did not fall into the trap of externalizing blame only to the United States. Anti black racism, like anti indigenous racism, he claimed are foundational elements of Latin America's capitalist societies. Ultimately, Homecourt presented a transnational system of anti black boy violence and pointed to the intersections between the oppression of various communities. This rhetorical move that he makes repeatedly restarts with racial inequity in the US south and then uses that as a frame for pushing his mostly Latin American interlocutors. beyond a depression era nationalism towards an identification not just with their own black national colleagues, but with black immigrant workers, is a strategy that appears in many common turn and related publications in the Americas and subsequent subsequent years, as well as in a whole set of related literary production, a set of proletarian novels that emerge in Latin America in this moment. In this moment, the Caribbean as Michel Stevens has pointed out is uniquely positioned at the decline of European empires and the rise of the United States and at the transition from older territorial forms of colonial control to an economic control based on the dominance of multinational monopolies and finance capital. thinking through the relationships between the US south and Latin America becomes a way of theorizing the overlap between various Imperial forms and the overlapping mechanisms of racial segregation and oppression. In this thinking, the south and the north and then relating it to other sounds. And early intersectional, anti racist politics emerges, as well as a theory on a transnational form of anti labor racial policing that impacts black indigenous and immigrant community was intervention which is relatively marginal to loveless discourse, will become central to another anti imperialist movement a few decades later, that of the tri continental, the tri continental, created in January 1966, when delegates from 82 nations came together in Havana to form the organization of solidarity with the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America do spoil. It will use the Jim Crow South as a microcosm of its global political struggle. So the immediate Origins of this tri continental movement are in cold war Afro Asian isms that um, but like the the AP so for example, but as this Afro Asian movement joined with movements in the Americas to become the tri continental, it really picked up on this earlier hemispheric American discourse from LA. The tri continental produced a massive amount of cultural production in the English, Spanish, French and sometimes Arabic, which included magazines, journals, books, pamphlets, radio programs, newsreels. Much of this material, especially in its early years, focused on the Jim Crow South and on the African American liberation movement. So here's just a few of these materials. But like I said, there's a lot. So in my book on the tri continental I trace how in these materials the Jim Crow racial divide of white and colored, is used as a metronome not for a global color line per se, but for a tri continental power struggle in which all radicalized exploited peoples are implicated. So the tri continental frequently describes its political subjectivity as colored peoples, but it uses this to refer to a shared ideological position. And these materials begin to compare the US south to South Africa to the Southern Cone of Latin America, and eventually just replace that notion of colored unexploited peoples with the term school south to refer to its global political movement. Through this discourse, the tri continental picks up on lavas project and also seeks to respond to earlier problems specifically within the communist movement by forging an anti by forging a global anti capitalist struggle at foregrounds racial justice. And that is especially focused on anti black racism. So rather than a class based movement, the black activists can be incorporated into for example, it is a movement that centers black activism, but with the intention of opening on to a trans racial, political community. And I should say that the tri continental interacts in very interesting ways with the Cuban states, problematic domestic racial discourse, and I can discuss that in the QA and I also will say, you know, I trace the discourse of try fundamentalism in these materials produced by the hosts file, but also in a number of radical movements, the black arts movements, the Young Lords on the new Rican movement, for example.

Unknown Speaker 47:21

The histories that I have briefly laid out here are still with us in some ways and not another's. The way that Hong Kong for example, connects transnational forms of anti black racism, anti immigrant, nativism and labor policing proceeds the kind of texts that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. In the case of the tri continental contemporary social movements, especially the alter globalization movement depend on this history in significant ways. A global understanding of power, ideological political identities that are forged through discourses of solidarity, a revival of the tri continental is radical aesthetics. But it must also be said that the ultra globalization movement often suffers from a complicity with colorblind new liberal multiculturalism. And racial justice organizing throughout the American hemisphere has tended to focus its critique on reforming the state sidelining at times of broader consideration of the intersection between racial violence and global capital flows. With this in mind, I think it is necessary for us to revisit these largely alighted histories of transnational movements against racial capitalism, and to think about their successes and failures, they as they sought to bring together resistant communities across national linguistic and racial difference. Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 48:40

Okay, thank you so much, Christine, and garland. While we wait for questions from the audience, by the way, please send us questions so that I can read them out to the presenters, and then we can start our discussions. But while we wait for questions, maybe let me ask you just questions. I just prepare one question for each of you so that we don't take up so much time. So for Christine, I'd like to know your perspective on the rise of right wing populism or right wing racist movement, not only in the US, but also in Asia. It was your presentation shows brilliantly the various forms of state violence, grounded in transnational regime of racism, built by the US Empire in the Asia Pacific region. I learned a lot specifically about the ways in which America's military and democratic rhetoric, the so called Pax Americana, has worked as a way to implement Niccolo politics of war machine to justify police brutality, and pit us against each other as enemies. What I want to what I want to hear from you, is how we situate the problem of right wing grassroots movement in relation to this transmission. regime of racism seems to me that the Cold War environment that you analyzed So effectively, is deeply related to the recent rise of right wing racist movement that invokes the Cold War discourse of anti socialism, communism and leftist is happening not only in the US, but also in Japan, India and elsewhere. In other words, how should we understand the link between the various forms of state violence and invigoration of racist populism? That's a question for you. And then I have a question for. Okay, so my question for you, is about Solidarity Movement in our time. I'm inspired by your discussion of the tri continental as adding to what we refer to as global cells. That places an emphasis on common histories of exploitation and oppression, while avoiding ratio, essential ism, it seems to me that one of the try Continentals contribution is its ability to articulate the importance of finding calmness in difference and difference in calmness, by paying attention to both race and class, as well as their intersectionality. When we think about our current intellectual climate in public and academic discourses, it seems to me that we still see much disjunction or disconnect between race and class. In public discourse, we almost exclusively talk about race, whereas in academia, critical race studies and Marxian analysis of class, don't really talk to each other. You know, them, you know, they only talk to each other in any way, marks, so Marxist scholars always insist on class analysis, whereas, you know, critical race theorists tend to emphasize race. So I agree that that's why the concept of racial capitalism is so important for the formation of solidarity in our time. I want to hear from you what lessons and inspirations we can learn from the tri continental effort to put race and class analysis in dialogue. That's a question for you. Okay, Christine, you'd like to start.

Unknown Speaker 52:35

So cats. Thank you so much for that very thoughtful and very complex question. And I can see that you're both responding to the presentation that I just gave, as well as parts of my book project, which you read. And I should say that day's presentation, although it draws in part conceptually, from that first book project actually tilts toward my second book project. So I wanted to disentangle parts of your question. And in my book project in my book, it's called a violent piece. I look at the racism of us militarism. And the question about how, how then there is a kind of reactionary, rightist sort of response to militarism is the complex one. And it really it doesn't there isn't an overarching, homogeneous answer for all the geographic sites that you listed. But what I'll say is that in the US instance, and here, we can think about Tucker fujitani. His work too, when he's talking about a World War Two, and you know, comparatively examining, and Japanese Americans who are in folded into the US war machine and thinking about how Korean colonial subjects are also unfolded into Japanese Imperial War Machine, you can see that there is a kind of logic there of inclusion, right, a kind of differential inclusion, to borrow a phrase from ethnic studies scholars, that invites participation, or complicity with us war, violence as the condition for some sense of expanded national belonging. And of course, anti fascist critics would call this fascism, not military multiculturalism, but actually fascism because it's a non class differentiated national unity that is predicated upon the existence of a shared enemy. So you know, with regard to To militarism and us militarism, in particular, and countries in Asia and the Pacific or to use the kind of us contemporary US military term the indo Pacific. You know, I think that it is very interesting that, you know, of course, like, you know, anti communism becomes the basis for rightest rehabilitation throughout the region, you could see this in the reverse course, in Japan, you could see it in many areas throughout Asia Pacific, you could see it in the Philippines and South Korea, you know, many places, but the question of how, whether or not there is a kind of grassroots politics around militarism, is complicated set, you know, side by side. And so you could say that, you know, in a, in Japan, the LDP has a kind of, there is a kind of embrace of the kind of reactionary discourse around the remilitarization of Japan, and then, you know, figures like awakens, Alberto and others will actually embrace, you know, the peace clause, that's part of the US sort of backed and authored, you know, close work constitution, but, but still, you know, that sort of discourse of remilitarization, you know, I'm not actually equipped to say how much populist purchase there is for that, but with regard to the Philippines to do their day to day, you know, you know, such an equivocal political figure, but appeared to sort of embrace at least rhetorically to espouse a kind of US military get out type of, you know, language, only to recently, you know, renegotiate the visiting Forces Agreement, you know, so, you know, part of his populist appeal, no doubt had to do with at least some kind of gesture toward Philippine sovereignty, you know, what I mean, and, but by contrast, in South Korea, you know,

Unknown Speaker 57:15

you know, I mean, it's not two exceptional eyes, liberals who are in power, you know, I mean, it's a complicated situation, because the situate that sort of discourse around militarism, and anti militarism, an anti basis, is the sort of purview of leftists, you know, and then tends to be compromised at the leadership level, you know, So currently, I should say, so, that's part of my answer to that. And then the other thing that I would say, with regard to the talk that I did give, you know, when it comes to these, you know, people like Adrian Hong, and you know, these other Korean Americans who agitated so intensely for North Korean regime collapse. You know, it's hard to say that there was anything grassroots about that, you know, you have to point to a number of things, you know, 1965, the sort of so called liberalization of US immigration policy, it was also part and parcel with earlier Cold War gatekeeping measures that were aimed at the National Security policing of populations that were allowed into the United States, communist, you know, or anti communist, you know, and so they're by sort of bio politically generating certain kinds of communities. We can think about Miami Cubans, you know, what have you, and Korean Americans were also by a politically policed in this respect. But it's also to say that, with regard to this sort of anti North Korea, human rights agitation, when you look at the funding mechanism behind it, and I look at this very closely, my other work, you look at the National Endowment for Democracy, funding, and, and manufacturing, what appears to be dissidents. And so in those cases, you have to follow the money, you know, and I don't know. I mean, this is another question like, to what degree is foreign policy ever a populist discourse? In the United States? I don't know. You know,

Unknown Speaker 59:28

I'm gonna score hats.

Unknown Speaker 59:30

Thank you so much for these questions, or for this question. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 59:35

I think,

Unknown Speaker 59:36

you know, you're absolutely right about, okay, sort of, like Marxists. And, you know, scholars of critical race theory, not necessarily always being in conversation, which is why this kind of focus on racial capitalism, I think is so important. And I think this has been a major motivation for me in wanting to recover these these movements, right? When I was first starting to work on the tri continental, a lot of the response that I would especially that I would get in Cuban studies was sort of like, Oh, just like more propaganda, more Cuban state propaganda sort of thing. So one of the things that I was really important to me in the book was to

Unknown Speaker 1:00:17

trace

Unknown Speaker 1:00:18

all the ways that the Cuban state is involved in this movement and the ways that this movement kind of gets away from the the Cuban states control. And I think, I think you're right, that we have a lot to learn from it. In terms of, as you said, our inability to articulate, you know, finding difference in commonness, and vice versa. I think another major contribution of this movement is the ways that it tried to bring class space and race space organizing together through centering black struggles, and then expanding outward from there, right. So you know, the kind of narrative that we have historically about communism is that it you know, was sort of like class based movements that then they would try to bring black organizations into right, and what you end up having is just a kind of colorblind class based discourse, you know, that, of course, that has predominated in Cuba, too. So, um, and I think there's a concept in So ultimately, one of the founders of BLM, who ran the black Alliance for just immigration for a while, she has this concept called transformational solidarity. And it's a concept that I think is very similar to try continental ism, which is, you know, she basically says, like, into, you know, I can't remember what the exact wording is. But until black people are free, nobody is free is basically the concept, right? But it's a it's the idea of starting first with black struggles, and then expanding from there. And, and I think one of the reasons that I'm interested in in laad love from that earlier Interwar moment, is because because I think it challenges the way that we narrate the history of the Comintern, because law law, you know, was a common turn funded organization. But it was supposed to be one of its like, mass organization. So it included, you know, it wasn't just a workers movement, right, it included intellectuals and artists, and it was trying to bridge a lot of different people together. And it had a really flexible ideology. And I think that's something that gets really picked up on in tri continental ism. Um, I also want to comment quickly, your first your question to Christine was on like, right wing populism, which I think is just on all of our minds all the time, and I live in Charlottesville. And, you know, it's been a huge part of my life now for a couple of years. And I think after, especially after the 2017 unite the right rally and terrorist attack in Charlottesville, it got me thinking a lot. And I've written on this a lot about with with a colleague named Joshua Lund. But it got me thinking a lot about the aesthetics of pair militarism. And one of the big problems I think, with the tri continental movement is the aesthetics like there's a huge slippage between the kind of aesthetics of militarism that we see in the streets in Charlottesville. And what we see in so many of the trade Continentals posters, the covers of the magazine, this emphasis, you know, there's a huge emphasis on masculinity on kind of phallic symbology on the individual, you know, there's all these, like, the Obama hope poster, for example, was based on a number of these posters where there's this kind of, you know, Lumumba or Amilcar coverall, like staring into the distance, right? There's this kind of hero worship. And that's another thing that really interests me about llama is the aesthetics that I'm seeing of a lot of the artists is a focus on on multiplicity, on heterogeneity on relation to them mobilities, photographer, feminist and queer photography. And I think that's something that we're seeing social movements, especially black feminist movements right now really recover that kind of aesthetics. And I think I think that's a really important move that we're seeing social movements make right now.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:36

Great, thank you so much. So we have received some questions for both of you. And let me start with ungallant. Here's a question. What do you consider are the main shortcomings of the tri continental though and which are the main teaching current movement, such as blacklivesmatter could learn from Goals shortcomings. Project respond?

Unknown Speaker 1:05:07

Yeah, that's a great question. Um,

Unknown Speaker 1:05:12

wow. I mean, there are quite a few shortcomings. I mentioned the aesthetic piece, I think, I think we, I think it's really important for movements, to think about how they're presenting themselves and to think about the aesthetics as part of the political discourse, to not necessarily in any way, so. So I think that's one thing. But one of the biggest shortcomings of the tri continental movement is that it's very focused on it, you know, it's celebrating black radicalism, it's celebrating black internationalism. But it's very focused on issues facing black people, in places other than Cuba. And there's not a very nuanced understanding of race, anti black racism in socialist and communist countries. So I think I think the biggest thing that we have to learn from tri continental ism is it's just extremely internationalist framework. And I think one of the things that I'm really interested in are movements that kind of started like if we think about the Americas movements that start south and look North heard. And I think that's been a common critique of the movement for Black Lives, even as it as it's becoming more internationalist. But I think, yeah, moving more internationalist, but also, learning from the try Continentals mistakes and trying to be nuanced, in the ways that we think about racial localization in different contexts.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:46

Right. Okay, so I have a question for both of you. So let me read it out. Both speakers provide critical insight about the contributions of radical black intellectuals and movements during the earlier periods of military intervention and the US Empire? To what extent do you do we see similar critiques and alliances coming out of Black Lives Matter, and movements against anti black racism today? So this is a question for both of you. Christine, you want to start first.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:28

When I was discussing how Adrian Hong was opportunistically seizing the term abolition, it's not as though you know, I'm not equating abolition entirely with black lives matter. There's a spectrum of, of politics out there. But it wasn't as though I was suggesting that there was a kind of commensurate move, you know, within abolitionist circles within the United States to viewing you know, North Korea in the way that North Korean human rights activists do, you know, but to say that there was a kind of opportunism on on one side. And you know, what I would say about whether there's a similar critique today, and maybe this goes to what ad was speaking about, too, I feel as though you the ways in which solidarity was envisioned before, you know, let's think about the late 1960s. And the kind of work that a term like third world, you know, did and how, you know, that, although that sort of raised to view points of continuity between populations that were racialized domestically within the United States, and those that were, you know, being targeted by US foreign policy in various ways, it also arguably flattened some differences. And I i'm not saying and another thing that I'll say, and I was saying this to students and non his class the other day, you know, it's that, you know, it's the United States, in terms of its counter intelligence campaigns against radicals. And so you can think about and this is someone who's at Robert Hill, you know, your colleague at UCLA, you know, working on racial conditions in the United States, and that FBI report, which was produced during World War Two, basically demonstrated that the United States during a period of Total War was targeting Domestic populations because the domestic arena wasn't just a site of war production, it was a site of potential sort of enemy saboteurs, you know, usually racialized subjects. But communists, black civil rights, you know, organizers as well as principally Japanese, or Asian groups, were all sort of placed under surveillance. And it was a very comprehensive report. And what I'd say is that one thing that you can see is that there was a concerted effort at different moments of radicalism, black radicalism, to ensure this nothing, I mean, the sort of the neutralization of these, these politics. And, you know, what I look at in my book is how that logical racial counter-intelligence, which was a kind of war, you know, wars sort of lens, you know, that it was used both domestically, and it was used abroad, you know, the counterintelligence core, which is in Japan, it was in Philippines, it was introduced all over the Pacific. And, you know, so this is just to say that when you look at the kind of logic of racial counterintelligence, it takes a very sort of similar form. It's a sort of listing of people who are, quote, unquote, with us whitelist people who are against us blacklist targeted for extermination neutralization, you know, and then grainless. Right. And so it relies upon racial complicity to in the exercise of us police and war power. And the goal is the decapitation of the leadership. You know, I mean, there are like security index files that are created, I mean, this could see this in Vietnam, you could see this also in cointelpro. And what that effectively has meant is not that there is no continuity, but there is a calculated an engineered disruption, of genealogies of radicalism. So you know, people who were part of the new left, you know, in the 60s, they said that cointelpro basically ensured, and maybe this is too far reaching, but I think it's sobering to think about how it ensured that

Unknown Speaker 1:12:27

activists were either they were in exile, they were in prison, or they were dead. You know, so, um, are there similar sorts of gestures toward solidary. I do think that there's opportunity. And this is what I have to say so many people talk about the militarization of the police. You can only think about the militarization of the police, if you're thinking about us wars, right. So there's just like, those kinds of connections, which are ripe for the making, are sort of I think, emerging, you know, they're not fully

Unknown Speaker 1:13:09

fleshed out.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:13

Yeah, just to add to that, I would say, I mean, I think we we do see similar critiques I mentioned about Tom Eddie's work, the black lines for just immigration, it's thinking about, especially immigrant rights, we see it in blms connections to the Palestinian struggle, and also to anti to struggles against police violence in Brazil. But sometimes, it's sometimes it's hard to know, I mean, the media to a lot of times tends to present these things as BLM goes to Brazil, you know, which doesn't recognize the incredibly long history of black Brazilian activism, you know, that preceded BLM. And I've certainly seen it on the ground in Charlottesville, where you have, like, BLM and anti fascist activists working together in, you know, immigrant rights stuff and anti war struggles. But I agree with Christine that, you know, we see a lot of moves in this direction, but it's not to the same extent as some of the some of these earlier movements. And I think that I think that's a big problem when we think that what we're doing is or I shouldn't say that, I think there is a danger in trying to reinvent the wheel rather than learning from these earlier models. And, and, and moving them forward.

Unknown Speaker 1:14:42

Okay, thank you. So we have I think, two more questions for both of you. So let me just leave the first one. What are some of the contemporary forms of afterlives of the American black anti fascism that articulates the linkage between Between the global patterns of us imperialism and domestic expression. Should I read it again? So what are the some of the contemporary forms of that of afterlives of the American black anti fascism that articulates the linkage between the global pattern of us imperialism and the domestic expression? So this is for both of you. Who wants to start? Do you want to start going?

Unknown Speaker 1:15:44

I can, I can try to take a go at it get complicated questions that probably require some more thinking. I mean, I've already mentioned some like in terms of things we see in social movements, I think, you know, one of the things that I do a lot in the tribe in the tri continental book, is I look at the returns of tripod mentalism. I look at it ideologically, I look at it in terms of political practices, and also look at it aesthetically. So one of the ways that you see the returns of tri continental ism is in political poster art. So I look, for example, at a poster at a really famous poster of Michael Brown that was circulated, you know, all over Twitter and all over the internet, and then look at it up next to these small posters. And they just striking similarities in the images in what they want to communicate. They're up next to to help close ball posters that were done of the moomba and Amilcar Cabral after their assassinations, and they're kind of all looking off into the distance of this sort of unpunished, you know, murderer, basically, and, and, and just even like, the even the colors, everything is similar. You also see, I mean, like I mentioned, the Barack Obama hope poster, which I think that poster in the way that it relied. So that poster, of course, was done by Shepard Fairey. Shepard Fairey has been known to straight up, copy some of these tri continental posters and sell them on his website. I mean, some of them are exactly alike. He just changes the logo. And that poster done by Shepard Fairey, which relies so much on these ospe, all these tri continental images, I think, captures a lot of tensions around the figure of Obama, you know, the way that he was kind of seen as a product of this sort of third world is imaginary at the same time that you know, obviously, he's kind of at the forefront of this kind of like neoliberal, multicultural, capitalist state. So, so yeah, I'll have to think about that question more. But those are a few things that just come to mind.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:02

I don't know if I have a ready answer for that. But I'll say a few things. I mean, one of the I ended by stating that anti fascism and black anti fascism in particular, enabled a critique of us war and police power. And we're in a moment in which abolition with its profound critique of us police power, you know, is has become sort of a household term, you know, but maybe not with the sort of deep sort of analysis that, you know, sort of key organizers have that there is a kind of, as I was saying earlier, kind of mainstreaming of abolition, but the question that I would pose is, what is the relationship between abolition to anti imperialist struggle? And I think that there are a course key figures who articulate this, you know, but is it a kind of pervasive, urgent and essential part of the discussion? Um, I am less convinced that it is, I think that certain there this kind of black anti fascist capacity to see kind of, you know, supposedly Invisible War Within and then to see us war action abroad. I mean, there are organizations, you know, in the Bay Area, you can think of that Arab resource in organizing Center, a rock that profoundly does this and, you know, was able to get operation I think It's urban shield, you know, which was trying to sort of sell warm materials to local municipalities like Oakland, you know, try succeeded in booting them out. But I guess, you know, this is one of the issues that I explore in my first book project. It's basically that, you know, when people think about some of the things that he was speaking about, you know, like when, like, for example, Jodi Malala, when she's talking about Cold War, multiculturalism, you know, it's it's this sort of shift or what how Howard line it calls the racial break away from overt white supremacy, you know, rarely are the sort of origins of that Cold War. multiculturalism understood to be military in nature. And so you have someone like Barack Obama, so and so as far as your Truman had his executive order, desegregate desegregating. He was military recommending that in 1948, but it's not realized on the ground in a sustained way until the Korean theater. And so, you know, in 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the arms disagreement, Brock Obama spoke at on the National Mall in front of a group of South Korean dignitaries from the neoconservative pumpkinhead government, as well as Korean War veterans and basically stated that the Korean War was a victory. And it was a victory because he said, over there, black soldiers You know, he said, Mexican American soldiers, Asian American soldiers, you know, American Indian soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder and if they could do it over there, then they could do it over here. So, in other words, the Korean War, which is profoundly illiberal. And I've argued that us war proud power has to be understood as fascist, and was retrieved as the sort of origins of civil rights you know, like by brock obama in this speech, and that obscures the sort of black anti fascist critique the sort of double fronted genocidal critique, you know, that kind of liberalism, you know, which is military in origin,

Unknown Speaker 1:22:32

is powerfully obscuring. But I guess I would just say this to, you know, the Korean War, which is known because of American veterans as the Forgotten War was absolutely essential to the United States being on permanent warfighting. It was the rationale for the entrenchment of the national security complex, it justified the expansion of US military, like the US Empire bases, you know, it rational rationalized as well, the military industrial complex. And I wonder, like in this particular historical moment, how we all should be thinking about the intersections between the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. And I think that that is a discussion that that needs to be had in deeper and more complex.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:30

Okay, so how many more minutes? Do we have? six more minutes? Okay. Um, I mean duking it out questions, actually, let me see. Um, okay, the question, this question is for both of you. I'm sorry. This is for ag. Okay. All right. So can you speak more about differences between la de la and the tried continental? Because it seems that even though la de la Percy's, the tri continental de la is more evolve, ideologically, both in terms of aesthetics, you mentioned, but also in its ethos of peaceful social protest, concerning the materialistic rhetoric employed in the tri continental What happened? And what happened with this 1920s and 30s emphasis at embracing the arts and the freedom of difference? That's the question. Yeah, thank you so

Unknown Speaker 1:24:35

much for that question.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:36

And I just just before I answer that, I wanted to piggyback on what Christine was talking about and just mention the work of Nicole Siegel. I think some of the people doing work in pair militarism are are doing a good job of drawing linkages between, you know, wars abroad, policing at home, Border Patrol, prison, the prison industrial Complex mainly through just following weapons following the the, the weapons and so, um the the difference between logline and tri continental well I do I

Unknown Speaker 1:25:10

want to

Unknown Speaker 1:25:12

I didn't mean to imply that Lala was a believed in peaceful social protests necessarily. This was also a militant organization. These people definitely believed in militancy. Some of them like what do you Antonio Mejia tried to throw tried to organize an overthrow of the Cuban state while he was involved in this organization? So So these were both militant organizations. And I think I think there are a number of differences between them. I mean, for one, Lama is more an organization that has its beginnings in has its beginnings in Mexico City has its beginnings in the hemispheric Americas, and then within a couple of years connects to this more global movement. So it's coming out of a kind of hemispheric American imaginary, whereas the tri continental forms out of the afro Asian people solidarity organization, it is true that the tri continental is a more militant movement. Also, the circumstances of the relationship, like between China and the Soviet Union at that point are very different. I mean, they're very different organizations. And I didn't mean to imply that one necessarily, you know, there's a perfectly linear relationship between the two, but just to draw a genealogical a genealogy of, you know, transnational solidarity movements against against racial capitalism, so.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:46

Okay, thank you. So these questions for Christine, have you found any evidence of the ways in which black anti racist critique of us imperialism and police action on the Korean peninsula was circulated and gained traction in post war North Korea? No.

Unknown Speaker 1:27:05

So I just want to mention a couple of works. And one is just to follow on a G's. comment about work that's coming out. And there's also Stewart traders badges without borders. So there's, there's there is scholarship that is coming out. But I wanted to also hear I would just say that the person whose work I would mention is Monica Kim. To Monica Kim looks at the interrogation rooms of the Korean War. And she really, it's a fascinating and wonderful study. But she actually looks at how, you know what the I don't know if you recall that in the PowerPoint presentation, that North Korean propaganda leaflet actually shows a black soldier who is in a Chinese POW camp who is shaking hands with the Chinese and, you know, a number of black gi eyes, you know, because they were given the option of repatriating wherever they want, a number of them chose to go to China. And one thing that Monica looks at is how it wasn't as though when North Korean interrogators entered into the room that they had no idea about Jim Crow. They actually did. And you can see that there was a kind of transnational circuitry, maybe through links to the to the Communist Party, you know, and others have information. And so one thing that was interesting is that that North Korean leaflet, it was giving information that a lot of blotchy eyes could not get because they were at times denied access to black newspapers that you know, mentioned the lynchings that were happening stateside, that Monica can speaks about how the interrogators and there's it's a dense or nexus of different kinds of racial relations within that space, including a lot of, you know, QA and ni se interrogators on the US and who weren't participating in the interrogations. But, you know, it's just to say that, you know, the North Korean interrogators had a very sort of deep understanding of Jim Crow, you know. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:29:45

And then, you know, Yeah, go ahead. No, I'm

Unknown Speaker 1:29:50

sorry, Christine, you

Unknown Speaker 1:29:55

he, I want to make sure you have the last few minutes. Okay, I

Unknown Speaker 1:29:58

just wanted to say one thing, because I was really Realizing that my response to that person's question was a little was, was not really getting to the heart of the question, which was that they were asking me about, like, why the aesthetics of kind of militarism versus these more like relational aesthetics? And I just I did want to say that i think i think that's right in the sense that I think that the tri continental I think, in a lot of these movements, even though they were internationalist, I think you definitely see the desire for the violence to possess the violence of the state. And I think even though within Lada you had you, they were militant, like they believed in militancy, to an extent they were actual, like true internationalists, like with the exception of Mejia, who tried to overthrow the Cuban state, they weren't in general, they weren't trying to form a new state. Right. And I think that has really important implications in the aesthetics. Sorry.

Unknown Speaker 1:30:57

Okay, thank you so much to both. It's actually Time's up. So yeah, you'd like to take up

Unknown Speaker 1:31:04

Yeah. A Thank you get a while just to make a brief a closing remarks. No, I want to thank No, a immensly to ungava mother and Christine Hong for for their presentation. Thanks, a cat. And, of course, thanks to a my co host nor a Shani fortune, and I'm in Kigali. The next a meeting of the next event for the black life matter will happen in the next quarter. On Friday, January 22. a cherry on channel a file January 22. Yeah, a there will be a band called abolitionists arguments have emancipatory futures, anti racist struggles and climate justice not so we will move on to an environmental issues. And on the Friday, January 29. In the New Year, there will be another presentation with the title to be announced no with the year passing among all the opponents. So this is the you know, the Adam North for the series now and again, thank you, everybody so much, a to the people who are listening, this will be posted know, as Jennifer says, I'm at the International Institute, a web site. Thank you so much, again, and see you soon at some point.

Unknown Speaker 1:32:41

Thank you all.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai