Conferencing

ConferencingThe Global South as Public and Counterpublic Conferences are central to the history of internationalism. 1 They enable representatives of countries, organizations, and movements to meet, discuss ideas, debate approaches, and determine a collective purpose: to come together as global publics.Much like the NGOs examined by Sarah Bellows-Blakeley elsewhere in this AHR History Lab forum, international conferences are characterized by structural processes of inclusion and exclusion; one only has to look at the difficulties faced by scholars from the Global South in obtaining visas to attend conferences in the Global North.And like NGOs, conferences, too, have a long and tainted association with empire. 2 They have served to entrench imperial power, from the Berlin Conference of 1884, which carved up the African continent for European colonizers, to the Paris Peace Conference, which instituted racial paternalism in doctrines of imperial trusteeship. 3 If global publics, as Huber and Osterhammel argue, come in two major forms-"associations" and "audiences"-decolonizing conferences mobilized both at once, serving as a physical meeting point for transnational activists while attracting new global audiences to their cause.They challenged an internationalist order shaped by colonialism and its legacies. 4 As such, to borrow from Michael Warner, they were both publics and counterpublics. 5 They drew strength from the visibility of Eurocentric global publics while creating new publics that centered Asia and Africa.The first Pan-African Congress, in 1919, occurred alongside the Paris Peace Conference, from which many Africans and African Americans had been excluded.It enabled participants to forge new regional solidarities to challenge racial discrimination and campaign for political rights.The All-Asian Women's Conference, held in Lahore in 1933, challenged Western women's movements' presumption to speak for all women and instead promoted solidarity among women across Asia (Fig. 10).Pan-African and Asian alignments gave way to transcontinental solidarities at the 1927 League Against Imperialism (LAI) Congress in Brussels, which brought together anticolonial nationalists, socialists, and communists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.The league drew on the organizational power and networks of the Communist International, bringing together communist-affiliated groups with wider networks of