AHA Session 236
Saturday, January 6, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Cyril Magnin II (Parc 55, Fourth)
Chair:
Rebecca E. Karl, New York University
Papers:
Session Abstract
Though global approaches to intellectual history have received wider attention in recent years, historians have long recognized the transnational dimensions of Marxist thought, and socialist thought more generally. Chiefly because Marxism and socialism played a large part in anti-colonial liberation movements in Asia and Africa, struggles against racial oppression in the United States and South Africa, and popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes in Latin America, scholars working on all of these histories have challenged the idea that Marxism and socialism can be understood exclusively as products of European politics and culture. This panel presents current research on Marxist and socialist thinkers during the Cold War from a range of geographies: students, feminists, and political organizers in 1950s Southeast Asia; African and Black Marxists returning to Lenin’s state-capitalist ideas to restructure a postcolonial Ghanaian economy; Asian American Studies professors reshaping ethnic studies paradigms; and scholars working with wealthy philanthropic foundations active in Latin America. These thinkers were concerned with issues of central concern to Marxism and socialism - the conceptualization of racial oppression, the legacies of colonialism, and the possibilities for economic development - although they worked in institutional and political contexts that have been relatively neglected by scholars. By placing these research programs in conversation with one another, we hope to illuminate new possibilities for a global intellectual history of Marxism and socialism.
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