In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.
In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.
Über den Autor
Salar Mohandesi is an Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College and a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine. His current project, From Anti-Imperialism to Human Rights, traces the history of transnational anti-Vietnam War activism. Bjarke Skærlund Risager is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto where he works on a project on resistance to gentrification and precarity under post-industrialisation. He recently co-edited Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells us about Ownership (Routledge, 2018). He is the co-editor of Revolution in the Air?: 1968 in the Global North (Pluto, 2018). Laurence Cox is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, National University of Ireland Maynooth. A long-time activist, he co-founded the social movement journal Interface and researches popular struggles for a better world. He is co-author of We Make Our Own History: Marxism, Social Movements and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto, 2014) and co-editor of Revolution in the Air?: 1968 in the Global North (Pluto, 2018).
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction; Overture: Lenin's shadow; 1. Internationalism; 2. Anti-imperialism; 3. Revolution; 4. Repression; 5. Crisis; 6. Human rights; Coda: return of the repressed.
