The Cultural Labor of Internationalism: Reorienting Global South Solidarities in a Time of Struggles
Description
As militarism, authoritarianism, and chauvinistic nationalism ascend globally, the need to imagine alternative forms of solidarity, including forms of grassroots internationalism, becomes ever more urgent. Across the Global South, movements for liberation and justice against connected forms of oppression, continue to emerge under conditions of intensifying external and internal state violence, displacement, precarious labor, and ecological crisis. Yet while “internationalism” as a form of solidarity is often narrated through the lens of Western liberalism, Cold War diplomacy, and/or state-led, ethno-religious, masculinist, and elite alignments, a growing body of scholarship has begun to trace its more unruly, intimate, grassroots, and culturally grounded forms. Still, many of these accounts remain fragmented or peripheral to dominant frameworks of global cultural analysis, or have tended to focus on their heroic dimensions, rather than their conditions of possibility. This seminar opens into this aspect, by highlighting the cultural labor, that is, the intellectual, affective, and creative work of sustaining solidarities. Such practices are often spontaneous, unpaid, unaffiliated with institutions, and not confined to any conventional cultural form, yet they remain crucial to forging alliances from the margins in the face of co-optation, disillusionment, and repression.
Rather than a fixed ideal, this seminar explores how solidarity emerges, shifts and falters through organizing, artistic practice, and transnational exchange. What kinds of political awareness, ethical ties, and imaginative vocabularies become possible when solidarity is seen as a lived and labored practice forged under pressure, often delimited and fractured by the very forces it seeks to resist? How do cultural forms such as literature, performance, film, translation, and oral history build coalitions across uneven geographies and asymmetrical positionalities?
We invite papers that explore the cultural labor of solidarity from the vantage point of the broadly conceived “Global South”, including intersectional migrant, diasporic, Black, Indigenous, and Fourth World positionalities. Contributions may cover diverse historical moments. Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, and papers shedding light on solidarities through unexpected sites or media are especially welcome. Possible themes include:
- Aesthetic genres, and formal experiments through which solidarity is imagined and mediated
- Feminist, queer, Indigenous, labor, and ecologically grounded solidarities
- Cross-regional comparisons
- Archival or ethnographic engagements with activist histories and solidaristic encounters
- The affective registers of solidarity: grief, rage, care
- Translation, mediation, and misrecognition across political or linguistic contexts
- “Global South” as a method to reconceive internationalism
- Postcolonial, decolonial, and Third Worldist traditions revisited in contemporary struggles
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sarah Saddler is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Baruch College CUNY. She is the author of Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India (Routledge), which received Honorable Mention for the 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award. Her current book project, Theatres of Extraction, explores how performance mediates labor and economic transformation across South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, post-apartheid industrial theatre, and contemporary sites of industrial heritage.
Speaker Bio
Maya Singhal is an Assistant Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. They received a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. Their current book manuscript, Safer: Community Defense in New York City, explores the conflicts and solidarities born out of community defense projects and alternatives to policing in Chinese, Black, and Latine neighborhoods from the 1960s to the present.
Speaker Bio
Caleb Murray-Bozeman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley, where he is also pursuing a Designated Emphasis in New Media.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ajay Bhardwaj is a scholar and filmmaker. He holds a PhD in Asian Studies from UBC and recently completed a Postdoc at SFU. He is researching South Asian diasporic activism in the long sixties and examining the archives of Third World solidarity movements supported by the Three Worlds Analysis. His recent work in progress is a video documentary, A Single Spark, on the history of the Indian People's Association in North America, a collective of anti-imperialist South Asian diasporic activists.
Speaker Bio
Hongyang Cai is a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is interested in studying modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture in a transnational and transcultural context. Her dissertation project asks how the encounters of Chinese and Latin American literatures reshape the way to contend with concepts in world literature. She is also broadly interested in exploring transnational feminism, magical realism and extractivism in literature.
Speaker Bio
Yawen Li is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Her forthcoming book, The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-reform China and Postcolonial Literature, brings post-reform Chinese cultural texts into conversation with postcolonial novels from Africa and Asia to examine the shared experiences of kinship loss as a response to historical trauma, state violence, and socioeconomic dispossession.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Anup Grewal is an Assistant Professor in Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research encompasses late-nineteenth to twenty-first century Chinese studies, at the intersection of cultural history, literary and film studies, and women’s and gender studies. It pays particular attention to transcultural and global circulations and exchanges of ideas and ideologies, texts and other media, and to activist and aesthetic networks of cultural practitioners.
Speaker Bio
Sandra So Hee Chi Kim is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. A transnational cultural studies scholar of Asian American studies, critical Korean studies, and the study of modern empire, her work has appeared in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Positions: Asia Critique, Korean Studies, and Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, among other journals, and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Kinning Empire.
Speaker Bio
Laiba Niaz Paracha is a PhD student in the Comparative Literary Studies Program, and her home Department is Asian Languages and Cultures. Her comparative work examines the relevance of lyric interiority in unsettling neo-colonial territorialities, navigating censorship, and anti-colonial solidarity work, bringing together transnational discursive traditions and black and queer feminist writings to research the intertwined genres of love poetry, homage, and elegy, as a poetics of resistance.