Transnational Struggles Research Articles

Russian LGBT activism and the memory politics of sexual citizenship

This article discusses barriers to the citizen practices of Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists in the memory politics of Russian sexual citizenship. Based on memories of activism, as told in interviews with Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists, we focus on how these memories play a role in their national and transnational struggles for sexual rights and recognition, and how intersectional inequalities may create barriers to their queer and memory space-making practices. The interviews were conducted in 2021 ( before the war between Russia and Ukraine, which started in 2022) and focus on the period between 2010 and 2020. Our findings highlight how intersectional inequalities of power influence Russian sexual citizenship and queer (memory) space-making, both at home and abroad. Theoretically, the results reveal the need to situate Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activism in time, place and space in research on narratives of progress and social change in studies of queer global politics and transnational solidarities.

Woman, here and there: Transnational struggles of Nazneen in Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Christine in Hot Water Man by Deborah Moggach

Paralleling globalisation, wars, social and economic insecurities, and the desire for a better life push people to cross those borders. The case of postcolonial migration between the former colonies and Great Britain tells a different story of border crossing. Although the physical borders are open for the newcomer, the psychological and social borders are hard to cross. In this regard, the migrants manage to cross these unseen borders through their fluid transnational identities. This fluidity enables them to carry on their background while passing the other side. However, it is clear that the experiences of the migrant as a woman are far more different and precarious. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali depicts the lives of migrant Bangladeshi women who live in Brick Lane, London, and provides versatile pictures of different experiences. Nazneen is the main character, whose transnational identity helps to transgress the boundaries between the host culture and her origin. Throughout the novel, she transforms from a shy, insecure immigrant young girl to a strong and self-confident woman with a fluid transnational identity. On the other hand, in Hot Water Man, Deborah Moggach presents a reverse migration from Great Britain to Pakistan and depicts Christine’s struggle to cross borders and gain a transnational identity. Although they share the difficulties of being a woman in the host culture, their experiences differ because of their positions and the representation of their background as a former coloniser and colonised. This study aims to examine the experiences of these two women, Nazneen and Christine, while crossing the invisible borders in their journeys to gain transnational identities.

The making of trade unionism in Libya (1943–1957): internal and transnational struggles

ABSTRACT Little is known about Libyan trade unionism and its role in the Arab workers’ movement. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, this article contributes a general overview of trade unionism in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from the time of the British Administration (1943–1951) until 1957. In this period, the Libyan General Workers Union (LGWU) emerged as the main workers’ organisation and the first trade unions laws were promulgated. Since 1957, with the establishment of the Petroleum Workers Union and the presence of foreigners working in oil companies, the LGWU’s supremacy as a representative of Libya’s workers waned, and Libyan unionism entered a new phase. This article chronicles the unknown history of Libyan trade unionism and highlights the significance of trade union internationalism, specifically, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Libyan labour affairs. This research discusses internal enablers as well as frictions within the labour movement, which ultimately hampered its social and political influence.

Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition

This essay proposes nonsynchronous juxtaposition as a narrative device to critically engage with the complex historical legacies of the Bandung Conference 1955 and to reclaim the anticolonial poetic of the Bandung Spirit’s transnational solidarity with a classed and gendered perspective of migrant workers’ contemporary struggles. It argues that juxtaposition forges “Bandung chronopolitics”, a postcolonial politics of time that invokes affective entanglements of historical memories and present anticolonial transnational struggles. To demonstrate the creative and dialogical potential of rewriting solidarities in juxtaposition, this essay performs a close reading that puts side by side two poems titled “Kepada Sahabat Asia Afrika” (To Afro-Asian Friends, 1961) by Sugiarti Siswadi and “Seusai Badai Berpeluk Puisi” (After the Hurricane Embraced a Poem, 2009) by Mega Vristian. This essay summarily positions the poetic of juxtaposition and Bandung chronopolitics as a discursive strategy to avoid unchecked glorification of Bandung legacies and to repurpose the Bandung Spirit as a political imagination that brings historical depth to the works of Third World solidarity from below against the highly coordinated global-imperial capitalism.

Place and the postcolonial poetry of Nigeria

ABSTRACT This article examines postcolonial engagements with place in modern Nigerian poetry. By foregrounding the mutual implication of text and place, it attends to the transnational struggles over spatial representations and alterity. It also explores how similar tensions are replicated on a smaller scale in terms of nation, region, and ethnic geography. Such a focus on the literary articulation of both the local and the global demonstrates the fractal dimensions of colonialism, as well as the spatial consequences of coloniality within the (Nigerian) postcolony. Four works – Tade Ipadeola’s A Time of Signs, Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems, Niran Okewole’s The Hate Artist, and Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth – provide the basis for the analysis. The article also sets out the importance of poetry, which tends to be marginalized in studies of modern African literature, as a crucial dimension of the African postcolonial interrogation of place.

Local, Regional and Transnational Queer-feminist Arab, Muslim, and People of Color Insurgent-Abolitionist Horizons

How can radical queer-feminist contestations of the longstanding disciplining and punishment of women, trans peoples, and gender dissidents elucidate the blast radius of the multiple, dynamic, intersectional ‘cages’ that define the daily conditions of racialized gendered-queer life that require obliterating? I examine the notion of capitalist and authoritarian nation-state ‘cages’ that punitively condemns racialized queer-feminist lives in the decolonial context of gender-based sexual harassment in Egypt and the inspiring autonomous and lateral anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist initiative that some of my queer-feminist Egyptian and Muslim fieldwork participants incepted to combat harassment in an ongoing post-revolutionary Egyptian ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter.’ My participants did not rely on state-discipline and carceral punishment mechanisms nor did they seek to replicate the reproduction of patriarchal violence towards abusers. Rather, through knowledge production (al-intag al-marify) they sought a more compassionate-transformative justice approach in combatting harassment that centered on illuminating harassment as a micro-fascistic cis-heteropatriarchal by-product emergent from macro-fascistic statist and capitalist structural hierarchies and inequities that cyclically reify each other at the vertical and horizontal level. Even prior to a covet19-viral laden world, they recognized that there is nowhere left to hide (if there ever was one for innumerable disenfranchised racialized/queered/feminized/classed/disabled/debilitated lives marked and targeted by a necro-politics of death. They gesture towards a non-ideological revolutionary driven ethics and politics that demands that we must all ask how we will collectively decide how live or die. They reject playing to a statist-politics of recognition, reform and rights, or recourse to martial and emergency laws that are contingent on and reify capitalist-state paradigms that (further) strips and extinguishes our communitarian and individual agency as a species. Instead, they argue for a politics of responsibility that focuses on interconnecting the burning ashes, timbres, and fires of our intersecting local, regional, and transnational struggles through mutual aid and social solidarity towards each other and nonhuman life.

Transnational Activism and Domestic Politics: Arms Exports and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle in the UK–South Africa Relations (1959–1994)

ABSTRACT In 1964, the UK government imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, which it maintained until the end of the white minority rule. What explains this embargo? Using mainly archival evidence, this paper demonstrates that domestic political dynamics in the United Kingdom mediated the influence of the transnational anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles on the British government. The United Kingdom imposed and maintained this embargo due in part to a domestic advocacy network, whose hub was the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The paper provides a comprehensive explanation of an important issue in British foreign policy, the anti-colonial struggle, and Southern Africa's history. There are theoretical implications for foreign policy analysis concerning the role of advocacy networks, interactions between local and global activism, the role of political parties’ ideology and contestation, the effects on foreign policy of changes in a normative environment, the effects of norm contestation, and normative determinants of sanctions.

The World March of Women: Popular Feminisms, Transnational Struggles

The World March of Women is an example of the transnationalization of popular feminism from below as defined by four elements: the diversity of women’s struggles, grassroots women as political subjects, alliances with mixed movements, and popular education as a feminist methodology. Class analysis is most prominent, with tensions and challenges linked to attempts to address issues of heteronormativity and racial colonialism, in part because of differences between local spaces in a global network and between relatively more localized and transnationalized scales of practice. A Marcha Mundial das Mulheres é um exemplo de transnacionalização do feminismo popular desde abaixo definido por quatro elementos: diversidades nos obstáculos das mulheres, as mulheres de raiz como sujeitos políticos, alianças com movimentos mistos e educação popular como metodologia feminista. A análise de classe é mais proeminente, com tensões e desafios ligados às tentativas que abordam questões de heteronormatividade e colonialismo racial, em parte por causa das diferenças entre espaços locais dentro de uma rede global e entre escalas de prática relativamente locais e transnacionalizadas.

Escalating Legitimacy Crises: Dwindling Political Authority and the Pursuit of Justice in Islamic, National and Global Arenas

Western and Islamic societies suffer from a common ailment—their citizens are losing trust in the basic integrity of their political institutions. There is a growing sense that systematic injustices are the core reasons behind economic, political and social crises. The result is a global decline of political authority. Embattled liberals in the West and the Islamic world want to bolster struggling democracies, new and old. Both groups see religion as indispensable in coping with chronic crises of legitimacy. Western liberalism’s sense of vulnerability is paving the way for a rediscovery of Islamic Modernism. Western liberals hope that open-minded Muslims can help them combat fundamentalisms of all stripes, including extremist tendencies surging in America and Europe. Today’s Islamic Modernists comprise an influential network of writers, interest groups and activists that can be valuable allies in transnational struggles for democracy and religious tolerance.

Rethinking the Revolution: Religion and Politics in Liuba Cid’s Afro-Cuban Adaptation of Fuenteovejuna

This essay discusses the contributions of theater director Liuba Cid and Cuban theater company Mephisto Teatro, highlighting the group’s Afro-Caribbean adaptation of Fuenteovejuna (2009). Cid interweaves elements of Cuban culture into Lope de Vega’s baroque verse, incorporating the works of romantic poet José Martí, playwright Virgilio Piñera, and African-inspired religious rituals. More broadly, Cid’s play reflects ongoing social processes of transculturation. The theories of Linda Hutcheon, Diana Taylor, and José Quiroga all elucidate how Mephisto Teatro’s staging transforms Fuenteovejuna into a syncretic work of art that transcends national and regional boundaries as it brings to the fore transnational movements and global struggles involved in efforts to reverse processes of cultural destruction and social inequality.

Recovered enterprises from the South to the North

Since the global crisis of 2008, Italy has witnessed several recoveries of failed private enterprises led by workers trying to escape the precarization of life under austerity. Some see this phenomenon as linked to the highly politicized occupations that took place in Argentina during the crisis of 2001. Italian recoveries, however, are usually far less controversial affairs carried out under the aegis of the state. What explains this difference? Looking at exceptions within the Italian case provides some answers. For example, a protracted conflict between workers (labor) and ownership (capital), the building of links with transnational struggles (including the Argentinian one), and the rediscovery of past working-class values such as mutualism all appear to be factors that can generate collective responses to austerity.

Bottom-up change in frozen conflicts: Transnational struggles and mechanisms of recognition in Western Sahara

AbstractThis article proposes a typology of causal mechanisms whereby transnational relations of recognition constitute conflict actors in frozen conflicts. While the agency of an emerging conflict actor manifests itself in ‘struggles for recognition’ motivated by experiences of ‘disrespect’, responses from different significant others vary in terms of motivations and pathways (mechanisms of recognition). Adapting Honneth’s tripartite division, the typology distinguishes between four forms of recognition: thin cognitive recognition, ‘respect’/rights, ‘esteem’/difference, and ‘love’/empathy. Three transnational corrections are made in order to include transnational relations of recognition, non-state actors, and unstructured social-relational forms of international/transnational recognition. The typology is applied to the conflict of Western Sahara, which has been reshaped by the rise of internal Sahrawi pro-independence groups (based inside the territory annexed by Morocco) as an increasingly relevant conflict actor, with their identity shifting from victims to human rights activists to activists involved in an unsolved conflict. This identity and social-status formation has been the product of transnational recognition from three significant others: the annexing state (Morocco), the contested state-in-exile (SADR), and the international community. The overall effect of intermingling recognition processes, including various instrumental initiatives deprived of mutuality, has been increased struggle and conflict complexity rather than ‘recognitional peace’.

Issues in Social Justice: Citizenship and Transnational Struggles (Book Review)

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Marginocentricity and cosmopolitan interconnections of black radical thought in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder

ABSTRACTThis study uses Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer’s notion of marginocentricity to examine Arna Bontemps’s novel Black Thunder (1936) as a construction of the American South, seeing it as a peripheral yet cosmopolitan topographical node that interlinks the slave community of Richmond, Virginia, with the French peasant revolution and the Black Revolution of Haiti. It argues that Bontemps’s fictional account of Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 revolt connects the slave uprising with the transnational, multiethnic, and cross-cultural radical political struggles for and discourses about an egalitarian American democracy, thus challenging national cultural paradigms from the margins. At the same time, Bontemps situates Gabriel’s rebellion within the class struggle of African-Americans during the 1930s, propelling the black proletariat to the center of radical social transformation and anticipating some of the major ideas of such future anticolonial and Diasporic thinkers as Frantz Fanon. By exploring Black Thunder as a testimony of a cosmopolitan African-American humanist tradition that speaks from the national and cultural margins, this article also sheds new light on the writer Arna Bontemps as a spokesperson of the oppressed and as an advocate for black radical political thought, supporting a culturally pluralist society based on humanitarian and egalitarian principles, which in turn converge with socialist and communist ideas of the period between the 1920s and the 1940s. With the figure of Gabriel, Bontemps creates a black working-class leader inciting social change from the bottom up, categorically rejecting the black petit bourgeoisie as a driving force for radical social transformation and instead prefiguring Fanon’s later milestone of “revolutionary praxis” and humanism put forth in The Wretched of the Earth in the context of an international anti-imperialism.

Acts and practices of citizenship: Muslim women’s activism in the UK

ABSTRACTDrawing on the growing literature on Muslim women’s activism, this paper explores grammars of action that frame political mobilizations of Muslim women in the UK. By taking a broad view of political activism, we identify acts and practices of citizenship through which Muslim women activists engage with, reinterpret and challenge social norms. The article critically engages with dominant readings of post-migration minorities’ political mobilization through the lens of citizenship regimes and draws attention to more processual and agency-centred perspectives on citizenship. We focus on two salient themes that Bristol-based Muslim activists were concerned with: mobilizing against violence against women, manifested in the anti-FGM campaign by Integrate Bristol, and attempts to re-negotiate the terms of participation in religious spaces, manifested in claims for more inclusive mosques. In both instances, mobilization was not confined to the local community or national level, but supported by and embedded in related transnational struggles.

Intersectionality and Transnational Feminism between Constructivism, Post-Structuralism and Epistemological Performances

What does it mean today to talk about intersectionality or, better, about intersectional approaches within the vast and fragmented field of Feminist Studies? And how can intersectionality help understanding the development of transnational feminism, and viceversa? By offering a brief critical genealogy of the notion of intersectionality, from the systemic to the anti-categorial positions that have characterized the debate on this notion, the essay tries to present a reading of the main questions that stemmed from thinking the working of the many power differentials and identity markers (gender, race, class, ages, disabilities, etc.) that constitute regional, national and transnational subjectivities. In adopting an anti-categorial stance, this work attempts at showing how feminism has changed thanks to different, yet complementary, perspectives on intersectional subject formations and positioning, along with the relational and transnational struggles that have been imagined in order to refine a feminist gaze at every level of social, cultural and political life, be it theoretical, methodological or epistemological.

Mexicans in the Making of America. By Neil Foley.

Mexicans in the Making of America . By Neil Foley. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. xii + 344 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $29.95.) Neil Foley’s ambitious new book makes a strong case for using a transnational approach toward understanding Mexican American history. Using over a decade of archival research from Mexico City and the United States, Foley has produced a highly valuable survey of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. His main premise is that Mexicans and their children have been making and remaking American culture through regional, national, and transnational struggles. To accomplish this, Foley situates “the history of Mexicans in the United States … within the context of relations between Mexico and the United States” (p. 11). Foley’s … jose.alamillo{at}csuci.edu

Issues in social justice: Citizenship and transnational struggles

The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadienVolume 59, Issue 1 p. e23-e24 Reviews / Comptes rendus Issues in social justice: Citizenship and transnational struggles First published: 03 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12156Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume59, Issue1Special Issue: alt.gisSpring / printemps 2015Pages e23-e24 RelatedInformation

MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA by Neil Foley (review)

Reviewed by: MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA by Neil Foley Valerie M. Mendoza MEXICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA. By Neil Foley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2014. Neil Foley has written an ambitious new book arguing that the regional, national, and transnational struggles for full citizenship rights of Mexican Americans have made and remade United States culture (12). The book is part survey due to its expansive coverage and part innovative monograph that will be useful for seasoned and new Latino Studies scholars alike. Foley begins with the Treaty of Guadalupe—what he calls the “Genesis of Mexican America.” Here we get a brief overview of the upheaval caused in the newly formed border region for Anglos and Mexicans alike. He follows this with the solidification of the border zone as a single economic region and its reliance on the labor of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. One of the issues that arises during the early twentieth century is the question of naturalization: can Mexicans be naturalized citizens?; if white, yes, or if indigenous, no. Foley emphasizes the transnational aspects of this question and shows the delicate negotiations that the U.S. government had to navigate in order not to offend the Mexican government. By far, however, the most interesting part of the book—and the area where I think the author makes his greatest contribution—are the three chapters devoted to World War II and its immediate aftermath. Foley presents extensive archival work to focus on the transnational aspects of the war. He effectively demonstrates Mexico’s desire for legitimacy and use of the Good Neighbor Policy to leverage respect for its citizens who served in the U.S. armed forces. Mexican citizens also worked in U.S. agricultural fields and railroad yards as braceros, who he claims were “Mexico’s most significant contribution to the war effort” (121). For its part, the United States government during World War II saw Mexico as a significant ally against the axis powers. Foley carefully lays out how the U.S. was keenly aware of the axis propaganda of U.S. mistreatment of people of color. The government went so far as to establish the Division of Inter-American Activities to investigate reports of discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans. However, this agency was largely ineffective. Curiously, the remainder of the book drops the transnational focus for a regional and national one. The chapter devoted to the Chicano Movement is familiar territory and serves mainly as a synthesis. The final chapters discuss the 1980s as the decade of the Hispanic, the rise of the term for census purposes, and the militarization of the border. The final chapter is particularly interesting as it traces recent policies and attitudes toward Mexican immigrants through a three-pronged approach. The first two are the backlash of the 1990s and post 9/11 era as represented by California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s SB 1070. Foley argues that these tactics were administered [End Page 164] by border states tired of waiting for action on immigration from the federal government—a regional focus. The final approach was/is national and is found in our nation’s obsession with border security and the shift from apprehension at the border to prevention from crossing the border. Overall, Foley accomplishes his goal and situates U.S. history into a Mexican and Mexican American context (rather than the other way around). Valerie M. Mendoza University of Kansas Copyright © 2015 Mid-America American Studies Association

The circulation of knowledge and practices across national borders in the early twentieth century: a focus on social reform organisations

In this article, we focus on the emergence of ideas and practices at a local level as the result of the transnational circulation of knowledge in social reform that became shared understandings in the transatlantic world of the early twentieth century. Bringing together the theoretical frameworks of transnational history with imperialism and post-colonialism studies, we revisit the results of two research projects on the settlement house movement and on the history of a childcare agency that were established in the same period in Toronto, Canada. The West End Crèche and St. Christopher House are examples of two organisations whose history can only be understood with respect to their transnational connections. Archival research reveals that the transnational activities of these organisations were immense; the imperial connections to Britain and the, often competitive, relations to the USA, were prevalent, as was social reform knowledge from continental Europe. These organisations, the outcome of local and transnational struggles and endeavours, became significant actors in the development of social services in Canada. We conclude with conceptual and methodological considerations for social work research and argue for a radically different framing of social work knowledge with the related set of questions about influences, strategies, resistances and translations.