“Dreams of a Common Language”: Revisiting “Third Worldism” as a Language of Solidarity

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

We live in a time period where solidarity - working-class, multiracial, intersectional, anti-imperialist - is more urgent than ever. Our panel, “Dreams of a Common Language,” makes the case that American Studies scholars would gain a great deal from a deeper historical engagement with the history of “Third Worldism.” As Vijay Prashad reminds us, “Third World” was not a place, but a political project that envisioned an end to the forms of colonial domination, including forms of internal colonialism experienced by communities of color in the United States. In a similar vein, Daniel Widener’s recent book, Third Worlds Within, points to how a Third Worldist critique challenges us to rethink our own common sense understandings of critical scholarship in American Studies. Widener, speaking explicitly to Critical Ethnic Studies, observes how scholars in the field have moved away from the “languages of anti-imperialism, solidarity, and the possibilities of revolutionary alliances across nonwhite populations,” in favor of a framework that suggests our freedom struggles across lines of racial and colonial difference are “incommensurable” with one another. The problem with this framework, as Widener puts it, is “the notion of incommensurability obliterates an entire range of actually existing solidarities.” As social movement historians, we, like Widener, “dream of a common language” that not only names the “targets of our resistance” but also provides “clarity about where we want to go or how to get there” (Widener, 13).

Our panel, “Dreams of a Common Language,” brings together emergent scholarship on a range of U.S. Third World Left organizations and understudied activist campaigns. Tiana U. Wilson's paper examines the radical roots of the International Women's Day (IWD) celebrations by situating the event in the TWWA’s anti-imperialist grassroots organizing, political education, and cultural work. Jose Lumbreras’s paper examines a counter-mobilization to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Survivalfest 1984, which he argues, offers a window into the ways that a politics of Third Worldism animated grassroots organizing and coalition politics in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda’s paper frames the murders of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, two Filipinx American labor activists and fierce critics of the U.S.-funded Martial Law regime of Ferdinand Marcos as a transpacific form of state repression that responded to the global scale of anti-Marcos organizing. Caitlin Wiesner’s paper excavates the use of “Third World woman” as an organizational category within the feminist anti-rape movement during the 1970s and early 1980s. Via an analysis of movement publications and the conference proceedings, Wiesner demonstrates how Third Worldism allowed Black anti-rape organizers to name the inseparability of state and interpersonal violence and the promise of anticapitalist revolution to secure women’s safety. Taken together, our collective panel papers demonstrate the urgent need to take Third Worldism seriously as a social movement analytic both historically and in our contemporary moment.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• The Third World Women’s Alliance and International Women’s Day Celebrations - Tiana U Wilson, University of Pittsburgh

• Survivalfest 1984: “There is No Distance Between These Issues” - Jose Lumbreras, Saddleback College

• Radicalism and Repression in the Era of the US-Marcos Dictatorship: The Transpacific Lives and Murders of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes - Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

• The Third World Woman in the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence - Caitlin R Wiesner, Mercy University

Chair

• Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

Comment

• Daniel Widener, University of California-San Diego

Biographical Information

Bio: Tiana U. Wilson (Panelist)
Tiana U. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. in History, with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her book project, “Revolution and Struggle: The Enduring Legacy of the Third World Women’s Alliance,” stems from her dissertation work, which was awarded the 2024 Lerner-Scott Prize by the Organization of American Historians for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Handbook of Texas Women, and the Washington Post’s Made By History.

Bio: Jose Lumbreras (Panelist)
Jose Lumbreras is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Saddleback College and a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on multiracial/ethnic solidarity. His dissertation, “Shared Imaginations: Black and Brown Solidarity in Los Angeles, 1965-1994,” examines how Black and Brown working-class communities united in a multiracial and ethnic context to advocate for social equality and racial justice in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces in post-Fordist Los Angeles. Jose is also involved in a seed project called Mapping Abolition, which experimentally maps spaces of abolition and the struggles of abolitionists.

Bio: Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda (Chair and Panelist)
Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University East Bay. As an Ethnic Studies-trained historian, his work sits at the intersection of social movement history and comparative/relational Ethnic Studies. His current book project No Separate Peace: Black and Filipinx Workers and the Labor of Solidarity in the Pacific Northwest, examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Black construction workers in Seattle and Filipinx cannery workers in Alaska between the 1970s and the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, Amerasia, a leading journal in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, and Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies.

Bio: Caitlin Wiesner (Panelist)
Caitlin Wiesner is an Assistant Professor of History and History Program Director at Mercy University in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She earned her doctorate in Women’s & Gender history with concentrations in African American history and Modern United States history from Rutgers University in 2021. Her research focuses on gender violence, African American women, feminist activism, and crime control politics in the twentieth century United States. Her first book, titled Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Advocacy Amid the War on Crime, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series in September 2025. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Modern American History, and the Nursing Clio Reader. She is the recipient of several awards in support of her research and teaching from the New-York Historical Society, the Coordinating Council for Women’s History, Smith College Libraries, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bio: Daniel Widener (Commentator)
Danny Widener (Konkow/Maidu and Black) is professor of history at UC San Diego, where he is also the
director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities. His first book, Black Arts West: culture and struggle in
postwar Los Angeles (Duke, 2010), received an honorable mention for the ASA John Hope Franklin
Prize. His most recent monograph, Third Worlds Within: multiethnic movements and transnational
solidarity (Duke, 2024), is a finalist for the ASALH best book in African American Studies. He was an
associate editor of American Quarterly between 2006 and 2011