Seeking panelists on radicalism, ideas of race, gender and class, transnational circulation of ideas

[lorenzo costaguta]

Dear All, 

My name is Lorenzo Costaguta, I am a Teaching Fellow in US History at the University of Birmingham (UK). I research ideas of race and class in the American socialist movement during the Gilded Age. My PhD focused on the Socialist Labor Party of America between 1876 and 1899, and I am currently working to expand my research on ideas of race and class in the Second International. 

I am seeking panelists who would like to present on the circulation of radical ideas (socialism, anarchism, republicanism, feminism, anti-racist thought etc.) across the United States and the world. Ideally the focus would be nineteenth century, but I am more than happy to receive expressions of interest from people that work on other periods. With this paper I would like to explore how transnational radical movements are created, how they operate and how they impact on US history across the 19th and 20th century. 

Please reply to this message or contact me at l.cos...@bham.ac.uk or lorenzoc...@gmail.com if you would like to take part in this panel. 

Thanks!

Lorenzo    

[brun...@ucsc.edu]

Dear Lorenzo:

Your work sounds very interesting and might be, I think, a good fit with the paper that I was planning to propose:  

The Making of a Radical:  Agnes Smedley and the Transnational Movement to End British Rule in India, 1912-1919.

Agnes Smedley (1892-1950) was an American writer and political activist, well known to contemporaries for her Communist leanings and her sympathetic writings on the Chinese revolution (she was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time of her death) and to later generations of feminists for her powerful autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth (originally published in 1929 and reissued by the Feminist Press in 1973).  Though Smedley grew up in a working-class Colorado family during the bitter 1903-04 “labor wars” in that state, it was not this that drew her towards radicalism, but rather something quite different:  a powerful transnational movement that Sikh labor migrants and sojourning Indian revolutionaries built on the West Coast of the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century to end British rule in their country. Drawing on a variety of sources on both Smedley and that movement, my paper will explore contacts that American-born progressives and leftists like Smedley built with South Asian revolutionaries, even as the mainstream of the West Coast labor movement (including a significant section of its Socialist wing), embraced a vociferous anti-Asian racism.  The paper, which will end with Smedley’s work with the Friends of Freedom for India and the League of Oppressed Peoples in New York in 1918-19, is part of a larger book project entitled “New York Against Empire: Challenging British Colonialism in a Time of War and Revolution, 1910-1925”

Let me know what you think.

David

David Brundage

Professor of History

University of California, Santa Cruz

[adam...@gmail.com]

Dear Lorenzo,

Your panel idea sounds very interesting and dovetails nicely with the panel idea I posted in this forum a few days ago. Might I suggest that we combine our two proposals into a single panel? As I stated in my post below, I work on transnational radical movements in East Africa and the Indian Ocean, but place these movements within a global context of labor migration, diaspora, and internationalist politics. The paper I am planning on proposing is on  left wing organizing among multiracial shipping crews in the early to mid twentieth century; while my focus is largely on British shipping between Europe and India, the subjects and texts I focus on also interacted with labor and radical movements in the U.S. (coincidentally to Professor Brundage's response below, Agnes Smedley appears quite often in the archival records I am using as well!). Given the overlap I felt like it might be productive to combine our efforts to create and propose a panel based on what seem to be mutual interests. Let me know what you think either here in this forum or by e-mail at lob...@illinois.edu. I look forward to hearing from you

Best,

Adam LoBue

Doctoral Student, History

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[lorenzo costaguta]

Dear All, 

A very quick message to inform that I have emailed personally all the people who replied and that this panel is now complete. Many thanks to those who expressed their interest in it, and I hope to meet you all in Durham. 

Best,

Lorenzo 

[lorenzo costaguta]

Dear All,

Please discard my previous message. One panelist canceled therefore I am seeking ONE MORE PERSON interested in joining the panel. We already have two panelists and the chair person. Please contact me at lorenzoc...@gmail.com if you have a proposal that discusses transnational ideas in radical movements. Given the papers received so far, proposals that focus on anti-imperialism and race are particularly welcome, but feel free to get in touch to discuss any potential idea.

Many thanks,
Lorenzo

[kpr...@terpmail.umd.edu]

Dear Lorenzo,

Are you still looking for a panel member?

I'm working on a paper now on internationalism and the critique of immigration restriction (among socialists, workers, labor leaders, etc) in the Progressive era. I'd be happy to explain this further.

Best,
Kyle Pruitt

[dasc...@gmail.com]

My paper is not transnational, but it's comparative, and would, I think, fit well here. I'm writing about how 19th century/early 20th century American radicals, including Radical Republicans, Populists, and Socialists of the Debs era (including the Victor Berger and IWW factions) thought about political parties and the possibilities of social transformation through or outside the party system.

-Daniel

Daniel Schlozman

Joseph and Bertha Bernstein Assistant Professor

Department of Political Science

Johns Hopkins University

Mergenthaler Hall 278

3400 N. Charles Street

Baltimore, MD 21218

[tej...@gmail.com]

Do you need a Commentator?

-- Tejasvi Nagaraja

Postdoctoral Fellow, Warren Center, Harvard University

https://warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu/people/tejasvi-nagaraja

[geoff...@gmail.com]

Hi Lorenzo,

My apologies for coming so late to your proposal.  I will fully understand if your panel is already complete.

I'm an independent historian researching the history of anti-racism in Manchester from 1945. I would like to give a paper on the transnational circulation of the ideas of Pan-Africanism around the fifth Pan African Congress, 1945-1950 and their impact in Manchester.  I would like to contrast this with the organised anti-racism of local Communist Party activists, influenced in particular by Paul Robeson.  the apparent disappearance of all these ideas  in any organised form locally in the 1950s and their revival, albeit with significant differences, in the mid 1960s, with black power organisations, regular visits by CLR James to the city and black workers taking strike action.

Geoff

[qquuee...@gmail.com]

Dear Lorenzo,

Sorry for this terribly delayed reply.

My name is Jiao Jiao. I have submitted a paper concerning the invention of union-employed statistical experts in the 1910s during the last few months of my PhD program in Peking University, China. I will be affiliated with Shanghai University as an assistant professor when the LAWCHA convention takes place.

The title of my submitted papers is “'A sound and true economics': the research department of the American Federation of Labor and the origins of union experts, 1910s-1920s.” I would draw a picture on the foggy origins of union experts in the US, in which the AFL's conflicts with the Socialist Party and the American Association of Labor Legislation on social insurance played as a key challenge for Gompers.

I am also working on a paper concerning the circulation of knowledge on labor management among pan-Pacific colonies in the early twentieth century. I believe I could learn a lot from your work.

Best,

Jiao Jiao