Transnational Legacies of Revolt: Approaching Decolonial Struggles in the Americas

Abstract

This review examines two recently published studies about decolonial struggles in the Americas, Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Duke University Press, 2018) and George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke University Press, 2017). The volumes reexamine current decolonial upheavals from two different perspectives. Mahler traces the cultural and aesthetic production of the Tricontinental movement, and Ciccariello-Maher analyses a dialectics that refuses Eurocentrism, teleology, and totality. Reading the two volumes together brings forth the expansive character of revolutionary movements in the Americas both from its material and aesthetic practices and from its theoretical implications.

Keywords:

• Tricontinental
• transnationalism
• decolonial studies
• dialectics
• Caribbean studies

In the first pages of Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott states that to adequately interrogate our present and find alternatives to it depends upon “identifying the difference between the questions that animated former presents and those that animate our own” (2004, 5, emphasis in the original). In other words, to revisit past decolonial struggles from our present perspective entails thinking about how our contemporary critical questions differ from previous inquiries about those events. By recognising the distance between past hopes and our current ones, we can fully acknowledge how our present longing for future emancipations differs from – and is also indebted to – how past movements of revolt imagined new openings towards unpredictable decolonial futures. Scott’s articulations resonate well with Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South (2018) and George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics (2017), two excellent examples of rigorous studies about the legacies of revolt in the Americas. Not only do these books echo Scott’s premises, they also radicalise them even further. The dialogue between these books invites us to tune into two different approaches to identify and actualise critical aspects of past struggles, in order to bring new insights to today’s research on theoretical and cultural studies on racial justice. The studies reveal that these phenomena generate pressing questions for our present that demand to be answered from instances where cultural studies, decolonial studies, and political theory intersect, but in so doing, they show how attuned they are for today’s preoccupations, by emphasising the hemispherical character of past struggles.

By exploring how the Cuban Revolution irradiates its influence across the Americas, Mahler converses with the corpus of books whose focus is the transnational character of revolutions in the Caribbean, such as Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror (2014), Sybille Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed (2004), and the recently reedited work by Julius S. Scott The Common Wind (2018). Sharing a common objective with Alfred López (2007) and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (2019), Mahler’s contribution includes Latin America within discussions of the Global South, given that most of the emphasis of recent Cold War studies has focused on African and Asian anticolonial activism. Moreover, her research echoes pressing questions beyond North American academia. For instance, her focus on the Tricontinental’s impact in Latin America runs parallel to the work of Maria Sol Barón and Camilo Ordóñez, and their books Rojo y más rojo (2014) and Múltiples y originales (2019).

From the Tricontinental to the Global South addresses the legacy of the Tricontinental in the history of emancipatory transnational struggles in the Americas after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The study is an immense contribution to the structure and impact of Tricontinentalist discourse, given the generalised silence surrounding how US Black intellectuals shaped anti-imperialist discourses in the Americas and around the globe. To go beyond area studies and their entailing confinement of cultural problematics to particular geographic regions enables the book to posit Tricontinentalism as a reading praxis possible only through an exchange of activists and writers across the US and the Hispanic Caribbean.

The first chapter lays out the conceptual framework to approach the Tricontinental as a global movement whose foundation emphasised racial justice and strived to connect movements of upheaval in Africa, Asia, and the Americas through a hemispheric body of cultural production. These included the Tricontinental Bulletin, posters, radio programmes, and the newsreel from the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). For Mahler, a cultural product belongs to the Tricontinental corpus if it fulfils three conditions: 1. It approaches power as transnational, escaping any conceptual framework based on a centre-periphery model; 2. It uncovers the interwoven character of imperial and racial oppression; 3. It uses a racial signifier of colour to describe a broader collectivity across classes and across phenotypical categorisations of race. As the author demonstrates, Tricontinentalism was by no means a product of the Cuban State propaganda apparatus. It inherited a vision of struggle qua transregional phenomenon from the long histories of Black liberation and Black internationalist thought. Attuned to contemporary critical questions about the diffuse character of global power, Mahler shows this inheritance as the condition for the Tricontinental to anticipate contemporary theories of power as transcending nation states, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Moreover, Mahler quickly complements this approach to power with the category of the Global South to give conceptual density to the Tricontinental’s vision of a collective political subject. Such vision relied upon an imaginary of shared experiences of oppression even inside boundaries of imperial centres. This is a shift away from a geographical organisation between wealthy and poor countries through a formulation of a deterritorialised vision of power, from the colour-blind model of Communist internationalism, and from a race-centred, pan-Africanist approach of negrismo.

In the second chapter, Mahler offers a thorough history of the emergence of the Tricontinental formal organisation out of Cuba’s efforts to form alliances within the Afro-Asian Communist bloc. The 1966 Havana Tricontinental conference marked a shift away from its predecessor, the Bandung conference and its principles of non-violence and developmentalist rhetoric. Out of the Havana meeting emerged a movement geared towards militant solidarity with struggles within imperial centres. This distinctive pattern came to be embodied in the famous six-minute newsreel Now (1965) by Santiago Álvarez. Mahler close reads the film to show Now as the paradigm of the Tricontinental’s postulates: the film called for armed militancy and decried non-violent approaches, including the pacifist faction of the US Civil Rights movement. In so doing, Now detached the African American struggle away from a localised US identity, connecting it with global anti-capitalist visions. The Tricontinental further disseminated this internationalisation of African American struggle by circulating multiple posters and writings from figures such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. This shift towards the global enables Mahler to lay out one of her main claims: Tricontinentalism uses a racial signifier of colour to describe a broader collectivity that exceeds the biological categories of race. She calls this process “a metonymic color politics”. The divide between white and colour is not racially deterministic: the image of a white policeman metonymically stands in for the global empire, whereas a person of colour stands in for a transracial resistant subjectivity. The metonymic colour politics reconfigured the geopolitical space as it made the US Jim Crow South the emblem of the global empire, underpinning the profound imbrication of race and class. African Americans thereby became the spearhead against a globalised system of racial subjugation.

The focus of the third chapter is the transnational exchange between the Tricontinental and the Young Lords, a US gang turned social justice organisation. With their campaigns, speeches, and writings, the Young Lords and the Nuyorican movement articulated a political project beyond a Puerto Rican nationalist frame. Their written production used the metonymic colour politics to carry out a Marxist analysis of class while delinking race from its phenotypical categorisation, asserting – just like the Tricontinental – that African Americans were the front-liners of global struggle. To delineate the revolutionary community at stake here, Mahler uses Lauren Berlant’s concept of “trans-affective solidarity”, which is the process of creating a collectivity via the “attachment to the process of maintaining attachment” (Berlant qtd in Mahler 2018, 11). In this revolutionary community, attachment produces a surplus of joy that is recuperated via the creation of new attachments. The community’s shared sense of struggle emerges not of a general will to overthrow a centralised power, but out of solidarity’s generative character. However, to frame this community under the lens of trans-affective solidarity has an underlying risk. To assert, like Mahler does, that a political subject emerges through an attachment to the very process of maintaining attachment easily dilutes the political impact into a solipsism of purely creating attachments while disregarding the very structures perpetuating racial and economic oppression. Solidarity ends up simultaneously referring to multiple attachments, to the reconfiguration of this community, to a delinking of race from its phenotypical categorisations, and to the political impact of these processes. This is not to say that Mahler’s deployment of this notion lacks any critical sharpness. In fact, trans-affective solidarity is key to understand the profoundly radical approach to gender and sexual politics by the Young Lords at a time when Cuba was beginning one of its most repressive periods, el quinquenio gris. With an analysis of how the Young Lords and the Nuyorican movement’s poetry and prose appropriated and reconfigured the Tricontinentalist discourse while preserving its radical potential, Mahler concludes the chapter by close reading Down These Mean Streets by Piri Tomas, introducing a new and revitalising perspective to this now canonical text.

The fourth chapter moves away from the US to study the Cuban government’s dissonant position of unconditionally supporting Black liberation movements outside of the island, while remaining silent on the nation’s racial inequalities. In spite of the denunciations by multiple African American intellectuals and US activists about the racist policies in Cuba, the Revolutionary Government concealed its segregational measures by combining pre-revolutionary myths of racial democracy with Soviet Marxism, thereby declaring that racism was non-existent in Cuba. Despite the fact that the Cuban filmic institute ICAIC was key to portraying the Revolution as fulfilling emancipatory ideals of racial struggle, the chapter centres on two ICAIC films that criticised the Cuban Government. The first one is Carlos Jiménez Leal’s PM (1961), the governmental censorship of which foreshadowed the outcome of the second film, Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s Coffea Arábiga (1968), a documentary on coffee and fruit trees around Havana. In the film, Mahler shows, documentary conventions mobilise a triumphalist narrative on the surface and surreptitiously signal continuations of racial hierarchies of the colonial past under the Revolution’s present, in particular, concerning racial divisions of labour. The argument that Coffea Arábiga appropriated the Tricontinentalist discourse against the grain of Cuban racial politics enables Mahler to reactivate the film’s critical edge for our times. She shows how the film gives voice to silenced Afro-Cuban counterdiscourses that linger through Cuba’s history, even after the ensuing erasure of Guillén Landrián out of Cuban filmic history.

In the last chapter, the author traces the revival of Tricontinentalism in recent social movements of the Americas. A wide variety of contemporary aesthetic materials return to the Tricontinental discourse, such as Shepard Fairey’s well-known poster “Hope” about Barack Obama or Michael McBride’s poster about Michael Brown, based on Enrique Martínez Blanco’s Tricontinental images of Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba. Yet, the revival of Tricontinentalism via alter-globalisation discourses against neoliberalism is only partial. On the one hand, these discourses emptied the aesthetic component of an emphasis on racial justice, displaying only a colour-blind multiculturalism. On the other hand, struggles against racially oppressed populations usually rely on critiques against state security, leaving aside the transnational character of neoliberal dispossession and capitalism’s deterritorialised racial violence. The exception to this phenomenon is, for Mahler, the Black Lives Matter movement: its emphasis on the deep imbrication of race and class best actualises the Tricontinental’s legacy of a transnational collective subject. BLM does justice to the Tricontinental insofar as it emphasises transformational solidarity on a global scale while moving beyond a focus on policing and criminal justice, towards anti-capital and racial inequality struggles. Through this process, not only does Mahler identify how contemporary critical questions differ from the ones that prompted the emergence of Tricontinentalism in the first place, but she recognises how new forms of struggle reactivate Tricontinentalism as a necessary praxis to think about the emergence of a transnational collective subject.

George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics (2017) addresses a similar task from a theoretical standpoint. Decolonizing Dialectics resonates with formulations on collective struggles, such as Bruno Bosteels’s The Actuality of Communism (2011), Joshua Clover’s Riot Strike Riot (2016) and Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party (2016). Yet, it also reverberates with recent decolonial re-readings of canonical philosophers like Michael Monahan’s edited volume Creolizing Hegel (2017), Jane Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Frantz Fanon (2014), or Rocío Zambrana’s forthcoming book Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico.

Ciccariello-Maher puts dialectics to the test. If we traditionally conceive of the dialectic as a total system in which history follows a number of steps to reach a harmonious closure, the book’s daring task is to think the extent in which the dialectical process can be radicalised, so it can lead towards unpredictability and openness. The process relies on stripping away the dialectic’s teleological character, dwelling in its contradictions, rather than solving them, and exploring the tensions and forces at stake in the movement, making us think in terms of dialectics (in the plural) rather than in a singular dialectic. To do away with the premise of an ultimate goal in history is the first step to recognise how colonial regions, taught to “catch up” with Europe, have their own dialectics, understood as dynamic oppositions, subversive struggles in open-ended processes leading to outcomes other than the ones dictated by linear progress. The wager of Decolonizing Dialectics is to analyse these motions by working through four figures: class, race, nation, and people.

In the first chapter, the nineteenth-century French political thinker Georges Sorel diagnoses a paralysed present. Both bourgeoisie and proletariat share an ideological framework of social harmony, which rejects antagonism as class relation. Jumpstarting historical movement relies upon finding ways to galvanise the two sides into an oppositional combat. Doing away with any assumption that there is a shared goal between bourgeoisie and proletariat, Sorel maintains that their sole attachment is the very irreconcilability that creates a breach between them. This purely oppositional relation is the only way to re-establish a dialectical encounter that takes the form of a clash between bourgeois force, which maintains the established social structure, and proletarian violence, which seeks to destroy it. Yet, according to Sorel, conflict is just the beginning: any long-term organisation of the proletariat entails a unifying horizon that only a “revolutionary myth” can bring about. In these terms, myth is a shared expression of the desired future that prompts the proletariat to assemble against the bourgeoisie. In my perspective, Ciccariello-Maher does not fully tackle the risks of conceiving the revolutionary myth as the motor for action. Marxism as myth is an ever-receding horizon of expectation that retroactively gives cohesiveness to the proletariat through antagonism against the bourgeoisie. For the author, cohesion through opposition seem to explain why Marxism as myth does not long for totality, yet he does not fully make clear why this gesture is not merely a nostalgic longing to reconstitute a long-lost unity.

The second chapter transitions from Sorel to Frantz Fanon, leading us from a radicalised dialectics between force and violence to an ontological quest for decolonisation. For Fanon, solely a decolonised and open-ended reformulation of the master-slave dialectic can allow for new struggles to emerge. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon’s personal experience is inseparable from the conclusion that Hegelian recognition systematically excludes the Black subject. Ciccariello-Maher elucidates how, for Fanon, the Hegelian dialectic carries with it a hidden realm that escapes historical motion. If, for Hegel, to recognise and to be recognised as subject requires the two sides to be on the same ground, then Fanon adds that without that common standing, one side is unable to reach the most basic zone of existence. Absent this fundamental symmetry, one of the sides (namely the racialised slave) falls below this level, into a zone that denies its condition of being. In the eyes of whites, Black subjects lack ontological consistence; to be Black is to be relegated to the zone of nonbeing. Following Fanon, Ciccariello-Maher states that Black identity emerges from that zone and participates in historical change if it takes part in a process of decolonisation of dialectics. To make oneself known as a Black subject involves an outburst that can only be perceived as violence in the eyes of whites. The radical gesture renders Black subjects aware of their excluded condition while making them visible in the realm of being by defying the established ontological system. Moreover, Ciccariello-Maher emphasises Fanon’s warning against a liberal universalism of equal rights, which relegates emancipatory struggles to the past. Formal emancipation does not acknowledge the existence of the zone of nonbeing, universalising the apartheid of the existing world. Dialectical movement becomes paralysed. Facing this peril, the author underpins that the zone of nonbeing is the condition of possibility for the dialectical movement, the violent gesture of appearing in the ontological realm is an opening towards an unpredictable future in which the horizon of universal reconciliation permanently recedes.

The third chapter follows Fanon’s thought even further by tracing his shift from race to decolonial nation, revealing a decolonised dialectics with global outreach. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), no longer can negritude or Black identity set dialectics in motion. The task now belongs to the decolonial nation. But Fanon’s conception of the nation is non-reducible to a geographical territory. It does not posit a sense of belonging based on citizenship. It is a collective reclaiming back what the colonisers had taken away. And so, the decolonial nation profoundly differs from Europe’s Westphalian nation-state. As such, to acquire consistency, Ciccariello-Maher points out, the decolonial nation needs more than spontaneous outbursts of violence: it has to produce a revolutionary weave of anticolonial uprisings via shared gestures of internationalisation of the decolonial struggle. In Ciccariello-Maher’s reading of Fanon, this nation emerges from the rural masses whose organisation allows them to coalesce in a temporary enactment of the people. In an anti-essentialist understanding of how race intersects with class, he traces how a Manichean division between coloniser and colonised is just the surface level of a complex movement that includes repeated confrontations between urban and rural populations and a transformation of spontaneous revolts into an organised guerrilla struggle. Such dynamics, which the author calls “dialectics within the dialectic”, are cornerstones of the decolonial nation insofar as they permanently create new divisions and openings for the dialectical movement to continue through contingent paths.

The fourth chapter studies Enrique Dussel’s decolonial dialectics of liberation, where we find echoes of Fanon’s conception of an outside to the ontological totality. For the Argentinian philosopher, exiled in Mexico since the 1970s, dialectics is grounded in an ontological premise of totality that relegates otherness to nonexistence. Ciccariello-Maher carefully explains that to counter dialectics qua totality Dussel threads a fine line between Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of exteriority and a concrete praxis of liberation. The author describes how Dussel’s reformulation of Levinas’s exteriority is grounded in concrete references to the realities faced by excluded populations throughout Latin America. Through his approach to exteriority as a dynamic intersection between race and nation, Dussel mobilises a critique against Levinas’s abstract conception of alterity as Eurocentric. In a thorough exposition, Ciccariello-Maher demonstrates that what Dussel calls “analectics” – the very gesture of reaching out to exteriority – does not disparage dialectics, but is a step in going beyond linearity. We have here a gesture of reaching out to a very concrete otherness to re-ground the movement of oppositions, destabilising the ontological premises upon which it traditionally rests. The chapter concludes by presenting Dussel’s notion of “liberation” as the process of taking off the veil away from totality to reveal its exteriority. Liberation carries with it the emancipatory struggle from outside and inside the realm of being.

This engagement with notions of class, race, nation, and people gives Ciccariello-Maher the necessary framework to approach Venezuela’s political processes in terms of combative dialectics in chapter 5. For his analysis, the author starts by explaining Dussel’s conception of el pueblo (the people). At this moment, Ciccariello-Maher exposes multiple shortcomings in European theories of the multitude when it comes to conceptualise decolonial emancipatory subjects. For thinkers such as Hardt, Negri, and Virno, the people is a closed unity that serves as the basis for a sovereign figure to arise. According to them, the multitude – the political subject for our times – emerges immanently from the dissolution of the traditional working-class and the sovereign nation-state. Ciccariello-Maher cuts through this approach by underpinning how the multitude erases colonial difference, subsuming specific decolonial struggles into an all-encompassing immanent subject. As the author has argued throughout, to focus on the concrete struggles of the colonised requires bringing out the force of rupture from an outside which, under a framework of immanence, becomes unreachable. Ciccariello-Maher shows that to work through a decolonised category of the people is the way to find such interrupting potential. This is why he reaches out for Dussel’s delineation of el pueblo: the Argentinian philosopher draws from the long tradition of popular struggles in Latin America to bring to light el pueblo’s revolutionary potential. El pueblo emerges through alliances between those exploited and those excluded, coalescing into a collective opposition against figures of consolidated power. In Dussel’s terms, potentia – the constituent power of the people – shatters the potestas – the existing totality of the constituted power – through an organised movement of revolt, hyperpotentia. This movement acts as a fulcrum for Ciccariello-Maher to address Venezuela’s political processes in the last thirty years. These last pages of the chapter become an invitation to read Ciccariello-Maher’s previous work on Venezuela’s radical politics in We Created Chávez (2013) and Building the Commune (2016).

Decolonizing Dialectics and From the Tricontinental to the Global South are important approaches to transnational revolutionary struggles from a decolonial perspective. Reading the two volumes together allows us to look at the expansive character of revolutionary movements in the Americas both from its material and aesthetic practices and from its theoretical implications. The two perspectives open a much-needed conversation involving Black internationalist thought, Latin American revolutionary legacy, and theorisations about anti-capital and racial inequality struggles on a transnational scale. If, for David Scott, to find alternatives to our present depends on finding new forms of interrogating our postcolonial past, then Mahler’s concerns about the hemispheric reach of racial justice movements when studying the Tricontinental goes even further. Her emphasis on categories such as metonymic colour politics and transaffective solidarity illuminates often disregarded underground currents of revolt. Her quest to find alternatives for our present leads us to be cognisant of how cultural production as organised praxis can help us conceive of a decentralised movement of upheaval by eliciting common insurrectionary horizons in different regions across the globe. On the other hand, Ciccariello-Maher’s grappling with dialectics, a notion with a historical conceptual weight like very few others, should not mislead us to think that his approach is not finely attuned to contemporary preoccupations. The set of questions he mobilises to interrogate our present differ from those that animated former presents. Moving away from discussions that stress the need to do away with the dialectic as a category of analysis because of its totalising ambition, the author’s bet is to radicalise and decolonise dialectics (in the plural) so that these can help us sharpen the combative character of today’s militant groups.

In the hopes that this will further expand the conversation about transnational currents of revolt, while honouring their invitation to do further research on the global horizon of decolonial struggles, I would like to point out what appears to be a productive point of tension between the two books. For Anne Garland Mahler, Tricontinentalism foregrounds contemporary theories of decentralised power and as such, the best frame to visualise these networks of global struggles is through Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude. She emphasises that grasping contemporary power relations necessitates stepping away from a colonial conception of centre and periphery, to focus instead on a decentred model of sovereignty. At odds with this approach is Ciccariello-Maher’s decolonial dialectics. For Ciccariello-Maher, insofar as the multitude is immanent to a globalised vision of empire, it erases the specificity of decolonial struggles. Pure immanence conceals the zone of nonbeing, the realm to which the racially excluded are relegated as non-existent. And so, the multitude and the framework of decentralised power that it embodies runs the risk of perpetuating the racial status quo. To signal this tension by no means implies a taking of sides, nor is it a call to resolve it. As the authors point out, to return to these past struggles requires a retracing of the transnational character of movements of liberation while also revisiting the important presence of racial struggles within them. This tension gestures towards the work still to be done to pursue these books’ rigorous approach to the currency of past decolonial struggles in the Americas. The two approaches emphasise the immense array of possibilities at our disposal – and the pressing need – to theorise the upheavals and racial battles of our convulsed present.

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Notes on contributors

Gustavo Quintero

Gustavo Quintero is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities at the Cogut Institute and the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell University. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, where he examines the cultural legacies of revolutionary processes in the Caribbean, Colombia, and Mexico, including its northern border.