Round tables > Transnational circulations : Protest ideas and practices in the Americas, 18th to 21st century

Transnational Circulations: Protestant Ideas and Practices in the Americas, 18th- 21st centuries

Thursday 15 June from 11:15 am to 1:15 pm

Bâtiment ATHENA salle 046

Organization : Marie Plassart (Triangle - Université Lumière Lyon 2) and Yoletty Bracho (Triangle - Université Lumière Lyon 2)

Speakers : Mathieu Bonzom (CESSP - Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne), Maya Collombon (CEMCA - IEP Lyon), Maria Tarasova Chomard (IHTP - Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis - CNRS), Luke Stewart (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne) and Frédéric Spillemaeker (CERMA - EHESS)

Presentation

In 1908, the American muse of union struggles, Mother Jones, addressed the workers of Irish and German origin in the Bronx in New York and urged them to show more solidarity. Are they "white-livered rabbits"? Why don't they help the miners in the western United States? Why don't they support the Mexican people against Diaz? His words show a transnational horizon, that of protest ideas and practices in the Americas.

From the Revolution of 1791 in Haiti to the mobilizations of Latinx workers in the United States in the 21st century, through the struggles for autonomy and sovereignty and against racism, the American continent is the scene of circulations of people, ideas and protest practices. Our roundtable offers to study these transnational circulations by drawing on collective works that have already brought Americanists together, including the international symposium on "Revolutionary Circulations, Europe - Americas" held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2014, the work on popular mobilizations and citizenship presented during the study day "Citizenship in Latin America from 1804 to the present day" at the ENS de Lyon in 2017, as well as those carried out since 2019 in the seminar "Socialism in North America" and since this year in the seminar "Lefts in the Americas". This dialogue on transatlantic circulations and on a diversity of American mobilizations at the local and national levels will be the ground for the roundtable's questioning of trans-American circulations of protest ideas and practices. 

In contrast to an approach that would juxtapose national case studies, the object of our roundtable will be, at different scales of observation, "the existence of multiple points of intersection between protest spaces" and the "work of translation and acclimatization that the variety of situations in which they act requires of the actors involved" [B. Gobille]. Keeping in mind the historical processes of nationalization of States and societies, these points of intersection between protesting spaces will allow us to glimpse, in mirror, the circulations of governmental practices and the control of contestations.

We will therefore question the existence of "imagined communities" whose ideas and protest practices do not stop at borders [B. Anderson]. In parallel, the question of the transnational as a strategic space of support to find the tools, ideas and material means, allowing to lead contesting struggles at the national or local levels, will be raised.