ICM NEW CONVERSATION
TEJASVI NAGARAJA (Assistant Professor of Labor History, ILR School, Cornell University)
"The Work of Internationalism: Labor and Black Solidarity in Global War"
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
4:45 p.m.—6:15 p.m.
DESCRIPTION
Historical accounts often emphasize a 1945 turn towards a postwar order, which came into crisis around 1968. In this context, American power and American exceptionalism were projected, but also contested by struggles at home and abroad. In this talk, I explore America's WWII generation and its formative labor and Black movements. I argue that soldier and defense-worker struggles coalesced into a “1946” generation of intersecting and internationalist activism. These intellectual-activists prefigured and marshalled the “1968” generation too, while navigating a changing global racial capitalism from WW2 to Vietnam War eras. Labor and Black internationalisms grappled with empire and war in various ways, amid social movement advances and defeats. To fully interpret a global politics and division of labor, it is necessary to study working-class internationalism and intellectual production from the bottom up.
BIO
Tejasvi Nagaraja is assistant professor of labor history at Cornell University in the ILR School. His research is focused on how labor and race intersect with empire and war. He is writing a book about America's WWII experience and generation. It reconstructs a transnational war-within-the-war among Americans themselves, linking racial and economic and foreign-policy contentions. Nagaraja's writing has appeared in outlets such as American Historical Review and H-Diplo.
