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