There is a growing acknowledgement—enabled by social media, public facing activists, and most importantly, and the increasingly complex network of global systems of oppression—that struggles are not isolated, and that countries are no longer witness to other national struggles, but we are now able to see how they are materially linked. Examples include the corporate-tech nexus between countries, the use of Israeli spyware by national enforcement agencies, or the displacement of indigenous populations in the name of foreign investment. From global mobilizations for Palestine, to simultaneous farmers’ protests in several nations, to labor and anti-colonial movements everywhere, political struggles mutually recognize themselves as materially connected rather than simply analogous. 

Furthermore, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting state socialism as a national and international proletarian project. Rather than treating socialist internationalism as a project exhausted by the Soviet Union’s collapse and China’s socialist market economy as merely vulgarly capitalistic, this seminar interrogates whether a materialist and dialectical reading of history can elucidate a more complex and contradictory set of relationships than what is popularly acknowledged in the popular (neo-)liberal consciousness. Working explicitly against accounts that reduce internationalism to “social imperialism,” the seminar considers the uneven, dynamic, multidirectional exchanges that developed within socialist states, anti-colonial movements, and postcolonial nations, producing distinct cultural and aesthetic forms, articulating socialist horizons across varying historical and material conditions. Literature, film, visual culture, and political art did not simply represent international solidarity – they actively participated in constructing a new and innovative political and aesthetic imagination. Frameworks such as world-systems theory and the theory of uneven and combined development further provide a means for understanding this dialectical relation between “First,” “Second,” and “Third Worlds.” Rather than seeking to reconstruct an idealized past, the seminar proposes a critical examination of internationalism as an unfinished historical project which persists in shaping the political possibilities of the present beyond the mainstream (neo-)liberal imaginarium and the tenuous future of the Western academy writ large. 

We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to:
- internationalist histories and aesthetics
- dialectical (re)thinking of “first,” “second,” and “third world” relationships
- print, visual, and performance cultures of internationalism
- infrastructures of cultural exchange
- uneven and combined development and/or world-systems theory
- role of art in conceptualizing meaningful internationalist solidarities
- translation and portability (of politics and aesthetics)