Afterword to ‘Doing the Global Intellectual History of Social Movements,’ Special Issue of Global Intellectual History

This afterword emphasizes how the Global Intellectual History of Social Movements shares the commitments of its subjects, historicizing their ideas in order to further their struggles. This has been a central component of Marxism, though the state socialisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have neglected this anti-dogmatic project. Moving from Marxism-Leninism to Sebastian Veg's discussion of the “Lennon Walls” of hand-written Post-it notes in the Hong Kong democracy movement, it highlights how women of color forged an intersectional feminism within and against the racist and transphobic leadership of movements discussed by Lotte Houwink ten Cate and Rosa Campbell. The afterword concludes that a global intellectual history of social movements should follow Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty in holding a space for subaltern voices, even as they disrupt the intellectual history of the movements' white leadership, as well as the academic narratives we write about them.