Coalition Building at Canadian Universities, Black Radical Thought and “Third World” Liberation

• In Event: Recovering the Third World Studies Project: Towards New Visions of Anti-Imperial Pedagogies & Global Solidarities

Abstract

Student movements around the world have consistently been on the frontlines of struggle in opposition to fascist sentiment, state repression, and warfare. Black studies entered the U.S. university in the late 1960s in this way, as a radical intervention into an antiblack, colonial-capitalist system of education. The movement for black studies across the United States was led by black students working in coalition with other racialized and radical student groups, with the support of professors and community members (Ferguson, R., 2017). The movement faced both extreme resistance, institutional repression and state violence, before university administrators agreed to some of their demands, including the development of black studies and other “ethnic studies” programs. The establishment of black studies was, then, a struggle between colonial-capitalist institutions and an anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and antifascist youth-led movement (R. Ferguson, S. Ferguson, 2015). Today, we should not seek to resolve this tension, but rather to remain committed to it.

Amidst this era of militant anticolonial and antiwar resistance, black student organizing across campuses helped to mobilize students in Canada as well. Cross-border collaborations were established during the civil rights movement, and black radical students at universities in Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax were in communication and worked in collaboration with Black Panthers and other activists from the U.S. as well as with Caribbean intellectuals in the Caribbean and UK. Moreover, a militant, anarcho-syndicalist student movement in Québec had been developing as part of the escalating struggle for Québec independence from British colonial rule and oppression (although the French themselves had arrived as colonizers) that was a large focus among students at the French universities (hampton, 2020, Lacoursière, 2007; Lamarre, 2008). The Québecois faced a stark racialized oppression, prompting them to identify with theories of black radicalism and decolonial liberation movements to the extent of thinking of themselves as nègres blanc, and of Québec as part of the Third World liberation struggle (Mills, 2010).

This paper considers the Third World Liberation Front and the Québec student movement, the broader revolutionary contexts from which they emerged and in which they were situated, and their impacts on higher education. I turn to student newspapers and organizing archives as primary sources for learning from students about anticolonial, antifascist solidarities and liberation front organizing within, against and far beyond their universities (hampton & Hartman, 2022). In so doing, I seek to trouble assumptions about who organizes with and for whom and what radical educational change has entailed, to suggest lessons for organizing against rising fascist sentiment and state oppression today. Conceptualizations of identity, nationalism and ‘crude identity politics’ have consistently challenged the black studies and Third World liberation projects of the late 1960s and indeed have been weaponized against them. There are crucial lessons to learn from examining U.S. and Canadian academic contexts in relation to one another, as well as from longstanding strategies and patterns of liberal counterinsurgency. While colonial-capitalist universities reproduce and uphold dominant nation state ideologies, they are also crucial sites of international convergence and resistance.

Author

• rosalind hampton, University of Toronto - OISE