global studies paper

Article

Decolonial Designs: José Martı́, Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, and Global Entanglements

Quỳnh N. Pha ˙ m1 and Marı́a José Méndez1

Abstract Drawing on the writings of two prominent political thinkers and activists, José Martı́ and Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, our article foregrounds the imaginative crossings, ethical–political inspirations, and mutual learning among the colonized. Although embedded in different histories, both Martı́’s and Hò̂’s writings evince an insurgent solidarity with others under colonial enslavement. They evoke con- ceptions of self-determination and relationality that are strikingly global rather than national or regional. Going beyond affinities of insurgency, we also investigate critical moments of silence and effacement in Martı́’s and Hò̂’s engagement with subaltern groups. In weaving their anticolonial visions together as well as examining their limitations, we seek to sketch the contours of an alternative, non-Eurocentric international relations.

Keywords decolonization, solidarity, José Martı́, Hò̂ Chı́ Minh, global political thought, subaltern politics

Global Crossings

In April 1976, affirming Cuba’s commitment to support the armed struggle in Angola, Fidel Castro observed: “In Africa, Cuban blood was shed alongside the heroic fighters of Angola, that of the chil- dren of Martí, Maceo and Agramonte, that of those who inherited the international blood of Gómez and el Che Guevara. Those who one day enslaved men and sent them to America, never imagined that one of those pueblos who received the slaves, would send their combatants to fight for freedom in Africa.”1 Postcolonial theorists of International Relations (IR) have argued that the discipline of IR has been predicated on a systematic amnesia of transatlantic slavery and how it constitutively marked the modern (post-Columbian) world along with the question of race in global politics.2 Castro’s remembrance of the transatlantic crossing of European slave ships contrasts with such amnesia. But more importantly for us, he pointed out what was unimaginable for the former enslavers: cross- oceanic solidarities among the once enslaved. While much of postcolonial literature counters what Edward Said calls the “consolidated visions” of empire by reminding us of the hybridity and “inter- twined histories” that mutually constitute the metropole and the colony, in this article, we point to

1Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Quỳnh N. Pha ˙ m, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2015, Vol. 40(2) 156-173 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0304375415594059 alt.sagepub.com

entanglements different from those between the so-called periphery and center.3 By focusing on the lives and selected writings of two prominent political thinkers and activists, José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh, we call attention to the crossings among the colonized themselves and the decolonial designs they embody and fight for.4

First, we draw from Hồ’s and Martí’s thought to counter the discipline’s silencing of political and theoretical voices from the colony. If names such as Patrice Lumumba, Sukarno, M. K. Gandhi, and Mehdi Ben Barka are mentioned at all (and they scarcely are) in IR, they are simply referred to as local/national leaders with provincial significance. Rarely are they regarded as theorists with pro- found insights into the complexities of global politics and into how slavery and colonialism funda- mentally constituted the modern world in which we continue to live today. Although widely read around the world, only recently is Frantz Fanon being recognized as an important theorist of IR.5

In addition, only a few scholars in the field have called attention to other intellectuals from the world of the global majority, whose political thought and practice bears anticolonial significance, such as Sri Aurobindo, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ali Shariati, Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, and Samora Machel.6 If silences, according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, puncture the making of sources, archives, narratives, and history,7 we dive into the writings by Martí and Hồ not only to find alterna- tive archives in unconventional sources but also to dwell on the decolonizing narratives of the global that they offer. For reasons of space, we refrain from discussing at length Martí’s and Hồ’s incisive critiques of European colonialism. Instead, we focus on the alternative political and ethical relations of the international, of self and others that they advocate and embody.

Second, our article centers not on Martí and Hồ as individuals but on their distinctly global con- ceptions of struggles for self-determination and justice. National commemoration often elevates both leaders to the status of holy apostles for having dedicated their lives to national independence. José Martí (1853–1895) died in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain in 1895 after a lifetime of mobilizing for Cuban political and intellectual freedom from Spain. Hồ Chí Minh (1890–1969) came to be an indispensable force and spirit in the Vietnamese wars of resistance against French colonialism as well as US aggression. If appreciated beyond national bounds, Martí becomes an iconic Latin American revolutionary and Hồ is predominantly read as a communist internationalist. Yet, departing from both a strictly nationalist representation and a limited understanding of their internationalism, we argue that Martí’s and Hồ’s global visions exceed national, continental, and narrowly demarcated ideological borders. Their political activism in exile and in their own countries, the liberation move- ments they were in touch with, and the futures of freedom and prosperity they envisioned for the sub- jugated in their homelands and elsewhere manifested an irrepressible solidarity with all those under the yoke of colonial enslavement. This solidarity, as we analyze later, is marked by endurance, insur- gency, and mutual learning imbued with a deep attentiveness to decolonial difference. Their commit- ment to their peoples never circumscribed their cosmopolitan affinities with other imagined communities. On account of these worldwide affinities, Martí and Hồ were not just thinkers and writ- ers of international relations; they also forged and lived a different kind of relations of the interna- tional, which took roots in solidarity, hospitality, and bonding through bondage.

Last but not least, by turning to anticolonial intellectuals, we take the colonial plantation seriously not just as a site of enslavement and exploitation but also as a locus of global literacy. An antidote to IR’s “relative incapacity to speak about [… ] the injuries done to [the Third World] through conquest and colonialism and the justice of its demands,”8 voices from the plantation record cries of despair as well as songs of faith, dances of joy, and stories of battle. In Édouard Glissant’s poetic articulation, “The cry of the Plantation transfigured into the speech of the world.”9 Furthermore, the plantation is not a closed space but, in Glissant’s conceptualization, an échos-monde,10 a site of world echoes that receives them and enables their reverberations from and to elsewhere. One can hear in Martí’s and Hồ’s struggle, language, and nation, echoes of multiple struggles, languages, and collectivities. Nota- bly, their voices do not merely testify to their victimhood. Bondage is not reducible to

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dehumanization. The bonds that hold the iron collars together also engender bonds of alliances. Bond- ing through bondage, as is clear in Martí’s and Hồ’s writings and activism, fosters both the specificity of different cultures and the imagination of a world of places that resonate with each other. This is not an unproblematic process free from politics. Their attempts to forge links with subaltern others also reveal critical moments of silence and effacement, which we examine in detail later.

In bringing into conversation the global José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh, which is of course only one among many possible beginnings and paths among the enslaved, this article sets out to remember the crossings that we may not know are bequeathed to us.

Insurgent Solidarity

Ahora son nuestros amos; pero mañana ¡quién sabe!11

(Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?)

Scenes of Insurgency

Martí’s travels through various Latin American nations helped to create bonds with peoples who fought against colonial and postcolonial violence. He encountered labor and antiauthoritarian strug- gles, along with ethno-cultural complexities, which later informed his critiques of the United States’ racism and exclusionary policies. For instance, while in Mexico, he collaborated with Chihuahua workers as one of their delegates to the First Labor Congress.12 Significantly, Martí’s work as a consul for Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, along with his participation in the First International American Conference held in Washington in 1890, alerted him to the dangers of US-led Pan-Americanism13 and inspired him to travel South in search of alliances that might put a stop to this imperial ambition.

At the time, the Haitian Revolution had ignited a fire of anxieties across the Atlantic World. Many Cubans feared that the mobilization for Cuban independence might lead to a “race war” or even a black republic like Haiti. Despite such paranoia, Martí journeyed several times to the Caribbean. In one such journey, with the help of Puerto Rican revolutionary leader Dr. Betancès, Martí visited the Haitian intellectual and statesman Anténor Firmin in Cap Haitien in 1893. Both Martí and Firmin were preoccupied with US imperialism and dreamt of an America free of foreign domination. Firmin later recounted how their conversations “turned on the great question of Cuban independence and the possibility of a Caribbean Federation.” He remarked, “[a]part from practical reservations, we abso- lutely agreed on our principles. We felt for one another an undeniable affinity.”14

These undeniable affinities as well as Martí’s dreams of Cuban freedom and of an anti-imperial Pan-Americanism sparked the vigor of his speeches, stories, plays, poems, foreign correspondence, and newspaper articles. Because existing scholarship already highlights Martí’s visions of Cuba and of the Americas, we focus instead on an overlooked, albeit remarkable, story among his voluminous writings: “A Journey through the Land of the Annamese.”15 He included the story in La Edad de Oro (The Golden Years), a Spanish-language journal that Martí dedicated to the children of Latin America. “Our children, we must raise as men [and women] of their times, and as men [and women] of the Americas,”16 he affirmed. Already, the horizon of time and space disrupted the exclusionary histori- cism of “first in Europe, then elsewhere.”17 Children in Cuba would grow up to admire not just those who fought for independence in their own country, but also Simón Bolívar of Venezuela, Miguel Hidalgo of Mexico, and José de San Martín of Argentina.18 Beyond their home continent, Martí also invited the children to join him in an imaginative journey across the ocean to what the Europeans called the Far East. Although the outlooks in the Americas were predominantly westward in his times, Martí looked “East.” Despite relying on European archives to envisage An Nam without having set foot there, his traveling perspective proved to diverge significantly from Orientalist accounts.19

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Instead of encountering a land inhabited by unfamiliar others as a “vast cultural and geographical blankness” to inscribe one’s own desires, fears, and fantasies,20 Martí treated An Nam, to borrow Toni Morrison’s words in a different context, as a place “already idea-ed,” a “culture being its own subject, initiating its own commentary.”21 Martí depicted a colorful tapestry of Annamese traditions, and more importantly, he vocalized the people’s determination to defend themselves against foreign invasions:

[W]e simultaneously craft bronze and silk; and when the French came to steal our Hanoi, our Hue, our cities of wooden palaces, our ports full of bamboo houses and reed boats, our warehouses of fish and rice, even then, with these almond eyes, we have known to die, by thousands upon thousands, to block their path! Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?22

Far from being superiors who brought civilization to primitives, the French were portrayed as nothing more than merciless invaders: “[T]he French is from another world, who knows more about wars and modes of killing; and from town to town, with blood at the waist, he has been stealing the country away from the Annamese.”23 Coming from an occupied land himself, Martí rejected Europe’s self- congratulating narrative of mission civilisatrice. He voiced what only the subjugated could avow: “Today they are our masters; but tomorrow, who knows?” Through this simple question, Martí under- stood the Annamese’s endurance while simultaneously undermining imperial prowess by pointing to its fragile temporariness. Even at the height of the French empire, despite its overwhelming arms and cruelty, Martí alluded to its eventual demise. By leaving the future of tomorrow open, he identified with the colonized’s resilience and conveyed their fundamental refusal to accept domination.

When critics of empire solely expose its crimes and/or analyze its mechanisms of power, they more often than not risk reproducing asymmetrical power relations rather than subverting them. In contrast, Martí questioned the very premise of imperial power. From the perspective of colonized peoples, he revealed not only the horrors of colonialism but also its everyday instability: “tomor- row, who knows?” The solidarity that Martí shared with the Annamese was, we contend, specifi- cally marked by insurgency. To sense the impermanence of colonial domination and affirm an independence to come, he must take for granted the dominated’s sovereignty: The Annamese, like Cubans, were a self-determined people, with or without European recognition. We may recall that Frantz Fanon avowed a similar truth more than half a century later: “The Algerians already consider themselves sovereign. It remains for France to recognize her.”24 In kindred spirits, Hồ would pro- nounce resolute dictums about the eventual defeat of both France and the United States in the land Martí had imaginatively journeyed to. He famously warned the French in 1946, at the beginning of what would be an eight-year war, “You will kill ten of us and we will kill one of you, but you will be the ones who grow tired.”25

Notably, in “Journey to the Land of the Annamese,” Martí appreciated the natives’ resistance to French rule not just in the battlefield but also in pagodas, where they listened to “the saints of their country, which are not the saints of the French,” and especially in theaters, “where they [were] not told things to laugh about, but the history of their generals and of their kings: they listen, squatting, quietly, to the history of the battles.”26 Elaborating on the vibrant space of Annamese community theaters, Martí gave us a glimpse of a street education that was alternative to what Hồ called the “make-stupid” policy (chính sách ngu dân) of the French, which only taught “the [native] youth to scorn their own root and race.”27

More than a place of refuge where there was no French, Martí noted the Annamese went to their theaters to “not extinguish the power of the heart.”28 The examples of unyielding predecessors fueled their determination to overthrow the present occupier: “In Annam, the theater is not about what hap- pens today, but about the history of the country; and the war that the brave An-Yang won against the Chinese Chau-Tu; and the combats fought by two women, Cheng Tseh y Cheng Urh, who dressed as warriors and rode horses, who were generals of the people of Annam and drove the Chinese out of

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their trenches.”29 Martí underscored the Annamese’s resilient history of fighting off foreign domina- tion long before the French came. The Annamese had successfully defended their land against inva- ders much more powerful than themselves before; they could and would do it again.

Martí’s noteworthy reconstruction of the Annamese’s insurrectionary theaters stands in contrast with the dominant representation of the enslaved as abject victims. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman warns against the danger of focusing, narrowly and routinely, on spectacular scenes of black suffering. The hypervisibility of these shocking acts of torture hides “the terror of the mundane and the quotidian”30 under slavery as well as obscures the whip in the liberal humanist form. Furthermore, the ravaged body of the enslaved perversely serves as a display of power while simultaneously invit- ing an empathetic identification that obliterates the pain of the other. Although often employed to denounce the degrading treatment of the enslaved, the casual and exclusive recitations of horrific spectacles, we contend along with Hartman, neither unsettle the power dynamics nor mitigate the degradation. Represented solely as the bearer of abuse and victim of domination, the enslaved is reduced to incapacitation and powerlessness.

We argue that Martí staged not scenes of subjection, but scenes of insurgency. Instead of viewing the Annamese as merely a subject nation and race, as the (tortured) site and scene of French power alone, he recognized them as full political subjects. When Europe produced itself as the only center of the world and the Orient signified to the outsider little but despotism and submissiveness, Martí related to the Annamese as subjects of the world and as world-making subjects. Cuban children learned to connect with the Annamese as co-sufferers under colonial yokes and equally as co- fighters to be “free in the land and free in thought.”31 Instead of being trapped in the Eurocentric map- ping of the globe, they inhabited a different international relations.

Although Martí empathized with the Annamese’s suffering under French rule, he did not provide a “testimony of the victim as victim,” which as James Baldwin reminds us, “corroborates, simply, the reality of the chains that bind him—confirms, and, as it were, consoles the jailer.”32 Instead, his sol- idarity was marked as much by insurgency as it was by a careful attentiveness to decolonial differ- ence. Martí honored the specific history and cultural form of the Annamese resistance to their colonial occupier, even if this might have been foreign to himself. Rather than dismissing theater per- formances as a mere diversion from the main task of armed struggles, he took care to learn that for the Annamese, their theaters were a vital source of social and cultural sustenance, as well as a space of collective memory and political rebellion in the making.

Even more strikingly, Martí recognized that the Annamese community theaters posed a fatal limit to French colonization. The French could neither eliminate nor even comprehend them. One could only listen to the music in these theaters if it touched one’s heart:

… the musicians embellish each tone as it feels good to them, inventing the accompaniment according to what was being played, in such a way that it seems that the music follows no rule, but if one listens well, one sees that the rule is to let the free idea play, to really excite the thoughts of drama, and put in the music the joy, sorrow, poetry, or fury that sits in the heart; without forgetting the tone of the old music, the entire orchestra must know for there to be a guide in the disorder of its invention, which is really much, because he who does not know their tones hears no more than the drumbeats and gabble.…33

Those who failed to appreciate the playful improvisation of disorder could hear no music. They were unable to discern the rich array of tones that kindled different emotions and desires. The whole mixture was just a lot of noise. This was precisely why, Martí observed, the Annamese theaters gave Europeans a headache and seemed odious to them (“los teatros de Anam que a un europeo le da dolor de cabeza, y le parece odiosa”). They were deaf to the music, the play, the history that it remembered, and the politics that it ignited. Meanwhile, the Annamese left the thea- ter with heated passion.

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Again, Martí rejected imperial superiority and underlined instead imperial illiteracy. He concluded with the double registers in which the colonized spoke and the utter inability of the colonizer to see beyond the surface and hear more than noise: “If a Frenchman asks them something along the way, they respond in his language: ‘I don’t know.’And if a fellow Annamese speaks of something in secret, they say: ‘Who knows!’”34

Undeniable Affinities

From his early years in exile, Hồ’s writings (under various aliases) evidenced an extensive range of alliance making with the colonized around the globe, be it in the form of journalistic articles, corre- spondences, organizational reports, or speeches at international fora. His documentation of colonial oppression extended across different lands and occupying regimes. From crippling corruption in An Nam, Martinique, and Morocco,35 to travesties at colonial courts in French West Africa,36 from rave- nous hunts of natives for cannon fodder in colonial wars37 to slave raids for plantations in French Polynesian islands,38 Hồ’s accounts exposed both the systematic nature and the varied manifestations of what Aimé Césaire names “thingification.”39 Beyond a focus on his own homeland in Indochina, Hồ kept readers abreast of the oppression in other French colonies in Africa as well as the British control in China, India, and Sudan,40 the Belgian genocide in Congo, the German extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples,41 the lynchings of African Americans, and the concentration of Native Americans into reservations in the United States.42

An article Hồ wrote in L’Humanité called “L’Enfumé” (Smoked Humans) deserves particular mention. In the form of fiction, it was dedicated to an Algerian murdered by a French military officer and based on historical events. Written in 1922, the story was projected to the future in 1998 when an imagined “African Federative Republic” celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence. A ninety- year-old citizen of the Republic recollected what his generation had to live through and die of under French rule. In particular, he recounted the time when his village fled to the jungle to escape colonial persecution and took refuge in a cave. The French hunted them down with guns and dogs and in the end smoked alive 200 men, women, and children in the cave. In the voice of the survivor, Hồ bore witness to the cannibalistic scene: “The horrid burning smell spread rapidly and became unbearable. What was it? Nobody knew […] Panic! Run? Run where? It was so horrifying! The sound of chatter- ing teeth, the ear-piercing shrieks, the paroxysm of hiccups, the sound of falling bodies, the mad cries turned that smoked dark cave into an absolute inferno.”43

We find this tale remarkable on multiple counts. First, the testimony to the muffled groans and convulsions of death in the inferno is strikingly reminiscent of Algerian writer Assia Djebar’s effort to unearth archives about her charred ancestors to resurrect the dead.44 The imaginative leap that Hồ took to dwell in solidarity with Djebar’s predecessors, with the colonized elsewhere, bears a note- worthy resemblance to Martí’s. Second, Hồ committed to our memory the violence of colonial wars: the fumigation of entire tribes by “civilized” armies. The memories of these conquests haunted us when former US President George W. Bush pledged to hunt down the attackers of September 11, 2001, in an unmistakable language, “We will smoke them out of their holes.”45 Third, against the boasted grandeur of colonial militaries, Hồ’s tale foresaw the formal independence of colonies in the mid-twentieth century. His global vision of self-determination was pronounced when he envisaged the futuristic republic not in An Nam or Indochina, where he came from, but in Africa, in dedication to an Algerian victim of French colonialism.46

In his larger corpus, Hồ’s solidarity with fellow colonized peoples was unmistakably imprinted by an insurgent desire to learn from unfolding revolutionary movements worldwide. He took careful notes of any activities that contributed to the cause of self-determination of any colonized people, including the Syria–Palestine Congress,47 Abd el-Krim’s battles against the French,48 and anticolo- nial associations such as Anushilan Samiti and Gandhi-led noncooperation movement in India, to

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name just a few.49 Hồ also documented extensively workers’ movements in Africa and Asia, includ- ing the labor struggles of industrial and agricultural workers across India and China,50 the widespread strikes and their bloody suppression in major industrial centers such as Osaka51 and Calcutta52 and in port cities such as Guadeloupe, Bizerte, Hamman-Lif,53 and Porto Novo.54 Instead of pitting prole- tariat internationalism against nationalism as metropolitan communists tended to do, Hồ espoused both. Even when he worked with the Comintern, he clearly articulated the need to “reconsider the historical basis of Marxism” and supplement it with national studies from the “East.”55

Furthermore, workers’ movements featured prominently in Hồ’s writings but were not his exclu- sive focus. Rather, he paid attention to radical initiatives from marginalized groups on the whole. For instance, in 1923, he wrote in support of the Levelers Association of Japan (Suiheisha) and more broadly the struggle for equality of the “eta” people, a discriminated community in Japan, whose oppression reminded him of the fate of the “sudra” caste in India and black people in African coun- tries.56 He also promoted gender equality, albeit within the parameters of Communist Women’s Inter- national.57 Most notably, Hồ was preoccupied with peasant politics in the colonies. Reporting that 95 percent of natives in French colonies were peasants (nông dân) at the Fifth Congress of the Commu- nist International in 1924,58 he constantly called international attention to their specific plights, which were not shared by workers, especially those in the metropole. Peasants were thrown off their land en masse by different methods of expropriation for colonial plantations, businesses, and settlement.59

When they were not cheated or forced out of their land, they were exploited with choking taxes and loans under the double yokes of landlords and capitalist markets.60 Particularly concerned about how to organize peasants effectively, Hồ recorded diverse experiences to learn from, ranging from estab- lishing peasant cooperatives and associations61 to strengthening alliance between workers and pea- sants,62 to mobilizing protests, armed uprisings,63 and guerilla wars.64

As demonstrated earlier, Hồ’s writings offer a vast archive to learn global politics differently. His testimonies bore witness to interconnected forms of violence and resistance that remain marginalized in IR. They are marked by both a desire to teach and a fervor for learning. More than merely assem- bling facts, as Brent Hayes Edwards highlights, Hồ and his colleagues grappled with teaching the metropoles “what a colony really is”with diverse forms of knowledge creation, ranging from piercing critiques to satires to fables and fiction.65 Simultaneously, they were hungry to learn from insurrec- tionary movements around the world in all their heterogeneity. In both cases, the generated knowl- edge was not only vital in content and rich in form, it was integral to life-or-death praxis. We argue, therefore, that insurgency, coupled with attentiveness to anticolonial differences, distinctly characterizes the solidarity expressed in Hồ’s writings. Such solidarity differs starkly from humanist sympathy, which is often urged by displays of subjection and presumes a universal humanity that everyone shares by virtue of being human regardless of historical difference. Hồ’s activism, like Mar- tí’s, shows us that taking insurgency seriously calls for attending to the specificity of the others’ strug- gles, which are inextricably entangled with distinct histories, conditions of domination and resistance, forms of cultural and spiritual sustenance, and shapes of action and creativity.

Far from being an abstract universalist or a mere Comintern agent with a fixed program for rev- olution, Hồ closely studied the singular situations of each colonized people and their organized resis- tance. Indeed, he relentlessly confronted the limited fraternity of communist internationalism by foregrounding the colonial situation in its diversity. He joined the Comintern because it was the only International that even counted colonized peoples as part of a global community: “The First Interna- tional only said, ‘The proletariat of the world unite’; The Third International adds, ‘The proletariat and oppressed peoples of the world unite’ … The Second International helps imperialism subdue colo- nized peoples (Governor-General Varenne [of French Indochina between 1925 and 1928] is a member of the Second International).”66 Even then, Hồ still carried the burden of constantly reminding the Comintern of “oppressed peoples of the world” other than Europeans and other than the proletariat. At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in 1924, he spoke against the prevalent

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contempt in the metropoles for colonized peoples: “I come here to continually draw the Comintern’s attention to a truth: Colonies are still existing.”67 He indicted European communist parties for their indifference to colonial issues: “All that our parties have done in this domain is equal to zero. In French West Africa military conscription is carried out via completely unbelievable methods of compulsion, and our press says nothing about this. In Indochina the colonial powers have become slave-traders and sell the natives of Tonkin to planters in the Pacific Islands; they have raised the length of military service for indigenous people from two years to four; they are handing over a large portion of the colony to a consortium of sharks … and our press maintains a stubborn silence.”68

It is also crucial to note how vital mutual learning among the colonized was to Hồ. Actively involved in the Peasant International and the Eastern Department, he dedicated all his energies to make the Comintern as effective a medium as possible to facilitate critical connections among colo- nized peoples. He realized that their acute weakness lay in “isolation … the lack of trust, of action coordination, and of mutual endorsement.”69 To counter this, Hồ fervently advocated for mutual learning and support: “How helpful would it be for the Annamese, if they could know how their Indian brothers self-organize in their struggle against British imperialism, or know how Japanese workers unite against the yoke of capitalist exploitation, or know the noble sacrifices the Egyptians have committed in the fight for their freedom?”70 He pressed for the institutional sponsorship to make such learning embodied, intimate, and as extensive as possible: “It would be very fruitful if the Comintern could send Chinese comrades, for example, to Indochina, Turkish comrades to India and so on. However, in order to complete these missions, [these comrades] must understand the entire situation of Asia and have intimate relations among those from different countries. Yet currently, there is no such understanding and relations. Under these conditions, there cannot be any interdependence and unity.”71

Although Hồ spoke of Asia in his letter to the Eastern Department, the alternative routes he drew of global travel, knowledge, cooperation, and intimacy might extend well beyond. His political acti- vism attested to a globalism of marginalized peoples. As the lawyer Max Clainville Bloncourt from Guadeloupe, one of the cofounders of the Intercolonial Union with Hồ, recollected, “I saw he was dedicated to the struggle for the liberation of all colonial and oppressed people—not only in Viet- nam, but all over the Earth … Once, when he learned of the barbarous French reprisals heaped on people in Dahomey, he was deeply incensed and suffered as greatly as though all this was happening in Vietnam to his own people. He was a humanist and internationalist in the full sense of the word.”72

To end this section, we wish to refer to Adolfo Gilly’s introduction to Fanon’s A Dying Colonial- ism, wherein he affirms that Fanon’s writing “testifies not so much to the death of colonialism as to the life of the masses in this age of revolution.”73 The great value of Fanon’s work, Gilly elaborates, “is in underlining the importance of [the masses’] inner life, their private discussions, their resistance, their seemingly indirect actions. All this exists among all the peoples of the world. It is on this deep level that the future—which will later on seem to burst suddenly and without warning into bloom—is being prepared.”74 It is this very affirmation of life that we find generative in Hồ’s and Martí’s decolonial thought as well. Learning from them, we may catch a glimpse of how their futures were—and ours are—prepared.

Forging Bonds with Subaltern Groups

Unlearning one’s own privilege is a narcissistic undertaking.

I would now say, “learning to learn from below.”75

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While we find much in Martí’s and Hồ’s thought that battles against colonial hierarchies, we also grapple with their complicity in maintaining hierarchical relations with certain subaltern groups. The latter was manifested particularly in their nationalist pedagogies. If mutual learning constitutes their solidarity with colonized peoples elsewhere, a structural inclination to teach more than to “learn to learn from below” often shapes their relations with intimate others within their imagined commu- nities. Caught in the modern project of nation-state building, Martí’s and Hồ’s writings and activism in relation to subaltern groups shuttle between their decolonizing impulse and their nationalist desire. Their bonds with these groups were forged, it can be said, in both senses of the word. Within this limited space, we try our best to investigate their alternative visions as well as their silences with par- ticular implications for issues of race and IR.

In their visions of an independent nation, both Martí and Hồ embraced subaltern groups in ways that unsettled the colonial imaginary. The civilization–barbarism dichotomy was pervasive and more explicit in their times than in ours. If “to be or not to be savages”76 was the question for the liberal Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento who sought to model Latin America after the West, Martí’s Our America77 offered an important antidote. Here, as in his denunciation of England’s desire to con- quer Egypt under the banner of the civilizing mission,78 he exposed the ways in which the dichotomy justified imperial exploitation and obscured the colonial relationship between creole elites and sub- altern peoples. His egalitarian tendency distinguished him from prominent figures of his times, who adhered to the deterministic belief in “naturally inferior” races and either equated miscegenation with degeneration or advocated it to “neutralize, to a certain degree, the terrible influence of […] millions [of Negroes] that keep on multiplying.”79 Sarmiento, for instance, considered indigenous and black peoples no more than “objects” to shape or to exterminate.80

Martí’s humanism set him apart not only from the stark racism of his contemporaries but also from a nineteenth-century humanism that took Western reality to be the basis of the common human con- dition. The centrality Martí gave to the subaltern challenged Europe’s exclusive construction of the human and its theoretical sovereignty over all forms of inquiries and representations. His call for children to stop feeling embarrassed of their mother because she wore an indigenous apron, his advice to governors in “Indian” republics to learn “Indian” languages, and his appeal to the universities to give the Incas preference over the Greeks in their curriculum were among the new ways of seeing and knowing that he proposed for Our America. Martí’s exaltation of the “indigenous elements” of America did not invoke a nostalgic return to origins. He was aware that although certain Western values inadequately addressed Latin American realities, they might have played an irreversible part in constructing Latin American republics. Thus, his declaration: “Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk should be ours.”81

Martí’s thoughtful consideration of indigenous peoples took many forms and was not circum- scribed to their experience in Latin America. The violence of conquest and the expropriation of indi- genous peoples from their lands is a persistent theme in Martí’s accounts. He found echoes of the vicious burning of indigenous temples, homes, and observatories by the Spanish82 in the inhuman policies of the US reservation system, where the “Indian is killed by a vile system that shuts off his personality.”83 Structural injustice, not racial predisposition, explained the desolate condition of Indians in reservations. As with his imagined identification with the Annamese, Martí’s writing about Native Americans sowed seeds of insurrection that pointed to the fragile temporality of empire. He highlighted the inextinguishable fire of their resilience:

A sense of downcast fierceness, that never extinguishes entirely in the enslaved races, the memory of the lost homes, the counsel of old men who experienced freer times in the native forests, the witnessing of their own incarcerated, vilified, and idle bodies exploding like intermittent waves whenever the rapa- city or hardness of government agents cuts back on or refuses Indians the benefits stipulated in the treaties.…84

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This fierceness, sustained by shared memories of freedom and bondage, constitutes the ever-present possibility of transformation in the lives of subaltern peoples.

Martí heavily criticized Latin American elites for not recognizing black and indigenous peoples as equal and legitimate constituents of the nation.85 As an antidote to the systematic marginalization of indigenous peoples, if not also a way to channel their downcast fierceness,86 Martí proposed an edu- cation that would awaken in them a political understanding of their rights and their role in nation mak- ing. This schooling would not teach the youth to “scorn their own root and race” like French colonial schools. It would instead conform to their needs and achievements and teach them about the history of their people.87 Martí also envisioned this type of education as a medium through which formerly enslaved black people could achieve social equality. Moreover, such schooling would not accord with the image of the nation as the beneficent father who brought the gifts of civilization to his savage children. In response to an article that, while praising his efforts at “elevating” black Cubans, belittled his independence initiative, Martí denied the paternalistic claim of elevation: “The person of color in Cuba is already a fully rational being that reads his book and knows his waist measure; without any need for the cultured manna to fall from the white sky.”88

Although Martí distanced himself from many of the racialized conceptions of his and our times, he was not immune to the epistemic violence of the slave society he had been born into. He himself was attentive to the fact that “an institution like slavery is very difficult to uproot from tradition as from the law” and that “what is erased from the written constitution remains for some time latent in social rela- tions.”89 This was manifest in his nation-building project, which, in the face of Spanish colonial occu- pation and possible annexation by the United States, sacrificed difference for the sake of unity.

Differing from a prominent literature that primarily celebrates Martí’s departure from the colonial thinking of his times, we find it important to consider the contradictions between Martí’s identifica- tion with the “wretched of the earth” and his problematic representation of subaltern peoples.90 For instance, closing off some of the liberating possibilities intimated inOur America, Martí showed anxi- ety about the threats that indigenous ways of being posed to the progress of the nation. Writing about indigenous peoples in Mexico, he claimed that “ambition is to them something unknown and useless; indolence at work is a natural consequence of the indolence of their spirit; a serious danger is the result of this neglect […] He doesn’t have anything because he doesn’t desire anything.”91 This state- ment is reminiscent of a Lockean valorization of labor and industry that should save nature from lying waste. Measured against this standard of reason and industriousness, indigenous peoples could only be deemed dangerously indolent, useless, and ambitionless.92 For another instance, as progressive as the schools that Martí envisioned were, they still aimed to assimilate minoritized communities into the imperative of productivity and development regardless of their wishes: “At times the Indians resist, but they will be educated. I love them, and because I do I will educate them.”93

If on account of their “laziness,”Native Americans threatened the nation’s progress, black Cubans’ claim to a racial identity became a danger to Martí’s campaign for independence. Martí felt pressured to allay the racial fears on which Spanish officials played to convince his compatriots that a mobilized Cuba might lead to a “race war,” and worse, a black republic like Haiti. Apart from his idealism, he abided by the notions of racial fraternity and raceless nationality to appeal to groups as varied as pop- ular class emigrés, professional and intellectual elites, and socially radical as well as conservative gen- erals of previous wars of independence.94 Repeatedly, he reassured his audience, “the black Cuban does not aspire to freedom … political justice, and independence as a black man, but as a Cuban.”95

Whether enacted by the literal obliteration of references to race or by the idealized projection of the raceless patriotism of black insurgents, this silencing of race, as Ada Ferrer points out, is an actively perpetuated fantasy.96

Martí also resorted to a discourse of gratitude and forgiveness that recalled the very paternalistic image of “cultured manna falling from the white sky” he objected to. He assuaged white insecurity by ascribing to black Cubans not just a gratitude they supposedly owed to the white

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revolutionaries of the Ten Years’ War for abolishing slavery,97 but one that granted white Cubans immunity regarding their “mistreatment” of black people: “Will we fear the Negro—the noble black man, our black brother—who for the sake of the Cubans who died for him has granted eter- nal pardon to the Cubans who are still mistreating him?”98 In addition to glossing over the myriad struggles of the enslaved that led to the final abolition of slavery, this rhetoric failed to fathom the profound racial inequality and antagonism that persisted in Cuba and was manifest viciously in the War of 1912, contrary to Martí’s naive assertion in 1893 that “[t]here will never be a racial war in Cuba.”99 By framing the racial problem in Cuba “not [as] a political one, but a social one,”100

Martí de-historicized and depoliticized entrenched violence against the formerly enslaved: “The Negro who proclaims his race, even if it may be his mistaken way of proclaiming the spiritual identity of all races, is justifying and provoking the white racists.”101 In promoting “mutual love and forgiveness on the part of both races,”102 his rhetoric equalized the positionalities of whites and blacks, as if both groups were evenly accountable for the racism rooted in slavery, and liber- ally assumed that noble sentiments could procure political equality and social harmony.103 Martí’s ahistorical flattening of racial hierarchies in his demand that “[n]egro racists and white racists must share the blame”104 is reminiscent of today’s complaints about so-called reverse discrimination and of color-blind multiculturalism more generally. In particular, his speeches run parallel to Barack Obama’s packaging of “racial conflict as a misunderstanding between social equals rather than matters of exclusion and power.”105

Although Martí was far from ignorant of racialized violence as a continuing legacy of slavery, his disavowal of race in the independence project, epitomized by his famous maxim, “There can be no racial animosity because there are no races,”106 denied the historical specificities of black subjectivity and thereby rejected the indispensability of black political activism in the collective fight for justice. This disavowal was neither necessary nor inevitable in the struggle for Cuban independence even though it is often projected as such. One needs only to remember the black and mulatto independence activists whose ideal of patria was not divorceable from racial justice.107 Furthermore, the most exemplary contrast to Martí’s adherence to a colorless Cubanidad was the “generic appellation of Blacks”108 that Haitians inscribed in their Constitution after their revolution.109 Unlike Martí’s, this abolition of racial distinction reversed the racial ideologies underlying post-slavery societies since, as Siba Grovogui points out, “‘black’ became a symbol around which to organize national solidarity and public life.”110

If African- and Native Americans (in the continental sense) hold an ambivalent place in Martí’s thought, peasants111 figure in Hồ’s political writings on revolution and the Vietnamese nation in con- tradictory ways as well. As influential as Marxist–Leninist thought was for him, Hồ did not absorb it uncritically but translated, with great care and stakes, what made the most sense in between the the- ories that he read and the realities that he faced. He shared the same orientation with Martí: “Manure can be brought from elsewhere, but cultivation must be done according to the soil.”112 Hồ’s preoccu- pation with peasant politics from early on revealed his clear departure from metropolitan communists who had mainly, if not only, the (European) proletariat in mind in their passionate invocation of the world’s oppressed. At the First Congress of the Peasant International, Hồ resorted to the following analogy to explain to his European comrades the plights of peasants in the colonies: “A Russian pea- sant is like a person sitting imposingly in a sofa chair, while an Annamese peasant is like a person tied to a post, upside down with head on the ground.”113

Not only did Hồ grasp the specificities of the oppression that peasants in the colonies faced, he recognized them as indispensable political actors in bringing about revolutionary changes. In 1953, amid the resistance war with France whose end was not obviously near, he wrote, “The basis of the national question is the peasant question, because peasants are the absolute majority in the nation. The basis of a democratic revolution is also the peasant question, because peasants are the largest revolutionary forces against feudalism and against imperialism.”114 He reiterated many times

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that without the support and participation of peasants in the revolution, there would be no victory to gain and no nation to build.115 Just as frequently and emphatically, he reminded the party cadres whose task was to mobilize villagers for the revolution that they had to constantly learn from the pea- sant masses (quần chúng nông dân). Rejecting the condescending understanding of peasants as ignor- ant and in need of enlightenment, Hồ affirmed the opposite: they were very intelligent, experienced, full of ideas and initiatives.116 He made clear that peasants were not simply people to work closely with and win over for one’s own agenda; they were teachers too and the only ones who could and should speak for themselves: “Any cadre who says ‘On behalf of peasants, I …’ says wrong. You as party members must serve peasants, lead peasants in the national revolution, but you cannot stand [in place of themselves] in their position.”117

There is, however, one role that peasants cannot be entrusted with in Hồ’s political thought: lead- ership. Despite emphasizing that they were the absolute majority and the most essential revolutionary forces, and despite knowing all too well that agriculture, rather than industry, was predominant in colonies such as Việt Nam, Hồ still assigned the leadership of the revolution, as influential theorists maintain, to the proletariat. In the materials used for political education of party members, he wrote, “regarding politics, ideology, organization and action, the proletariat must play the leadership role.”118 The “revolutionary characteristics” of the proletariat included “determination, thoroughness, collectivity, organization, and discipline.”119 Let us note that these qualities are opposite to the com- mon tropes of peasants as irresolute, isolated, unorganized, spontaneous, and unruly. Although Hồ countered many negative representations of peasants and placed them at the center of the revolution, he did not give up the insistence that they must be led by others: “Cadres must learn about the masses and learn from the masses in order to lead the masses.”120 Peasants, who were valued for their knowl- edge, initiatives, and overwhelming power as a collective, still figured in the nationalist vision some- how as a lack. Although not racially classified, peasants remained inferiorized with lasting implications for a postindependence future.

Tensions pulsate both Martí’s and Hồ’s texts between their efforts to build political communities upon, rather than in spite of, their heterogeneity and the tendency to tame, discipline, and filter this heterogeneity in the name of unity and progress. These tensions compel us to be vigilant of the hier- archical thinking that continues to structure our relations with and representations of subaltern others. While both Martí and Hồ radically reached out to the global marginalized and made noteworthy efforts to forge bonds with subaltern groups, their nationalist pedagogies, coupled with the belief in modernity’s promise of progress, limited their decolonial visions. This ambivalent desire to teach intimate others in one’s constructed communities remains a legacy for us to reckon with in the “post- colonial” world.

“We Are All Haitians Here”: An Échos-monde?

During the final preparations for the expedition to gain Cuban independence, Martí wrote in his diary about an encounter with a Haitian peasant in Cap Haitien. Wading across a stream, the strings of Mar- tí’s cloak came undone when a peasant noticed him and leaped down from his donkey to offer help. The peasant exclaimed, “Oh compère! Don’t worry about it. Not like that, not like that, friend. On the road, boy helps boy. We are all Haitians here.”121 He bit the strings, unfolded them, and after mending them, he continued talking to Martí about his wife and three kids and about how “good a man feels when he meets friendly souls, when the stranger suddenly appears so familiar that he stays in the soul sturdy and deep like a root.”122

One could read Martí’s story of the encounter as a privileged traveler’s romanticization of the noble native/peasant. The traveler’s ease of feeling at home in a foreign land is suspect. His emphasis on the native’s hospitality might occlude the power dynamics that structured their encounter racially, economically, and otherwise. Would the Haitian peasant be equally welcomed in Martí’s homeland?

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Could he travel there in the first place? Yet it is worth noting that even if the anecdote divulges a sheer fantasy, it is a fantasy of camaraderie, not of possession and control. Martí’s narration of the Haitian’s response to his presence inspires us toward a reading that leans on Glissant’s conceptualization of the plantation as an échos-monde.

Invoking friendship, souls, and root, Martí’s account accentuates the mutuality and depth of a potential spiritual bond between people from different lands, an interstitial intimacy that loosens the foreign-national division. If the offer of hospitality generally requires one to be the master of the house or nation, to keep those hosted under control, and to partake in territorial claims to an exclusive identity,123 the hospitality that Martí brings to our attention seems to open up other possibilities. Those whom the peasant hosts in Haitian lands are not aliens, temporary residents, or strangers, but compadres and friends, even Haitians. When the peasant says to Martí, “we are all Haitians here,” he shifts the limits of our sense of space and relinquishes the national narrative of fixed origins and bor- ders, which in our times would render Martí a Cuban exile or illegal immigrant. Martí is welcomed as a Haitian, not for the purpose of national assimilation, but as part of a sense of relations that are expe- rienced by being both rooted and open, here and elsewhere. The peasant’s Haiti is an échos-monde, a singular site which does not predetermine individual and collective states of being (the citizen/the refugee/the immigrant). It receives and enables the resounding echoes of an elsewhere. Through Mar- tí’s anecdote, we might see a world where hospitality neither leads to legal categories of ex/in-clusion nor is deemed an offense (as, for instance, a “crime of solidarity” 2005 French law criminalized cit- izens who assisted undocumented immigrants)124; instead, hospitable bonds inaugurate uncanny entwinement that confuses our rigid boundaries of what and who constitutes “community.”

For us, the Haitian peasant’s warm embrace of a compère and the global entanglements that bound Martí and Hồ to others’ decolonizing struggles, in different albeit related ways, gesture to a set of international relations that revolve around the multiple crossings constitutive of our world. Neither stemming from a single root nor relinquishing roots altogether, their globalism, solidarity, and hospi- tality to others’ lives and struggles lie in their openness to receiving and reverberating echoes from elsewhere. Reviving the échos-monde of intercolonial crossings, our article is part of a larger enter- prise that seeks to, as Charles Mills puts it, “resurrect the suppressed time of the insurrectionary plan- tation. Orthodox IR gives us a periodization of the governor’s palace, the colonial house, the slave owner’s mansion, when what we want to hear is a different clock of the slave quarters, of the planta- tion shacks, the longue durée of anti-colonial struggles.”125 Following the imaginative and political journeys of José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh is only one modest beginning among myriad others, we would like to suggest, in our collective endeavor to co-enunciate other desires and designs of the global.

Acknowledgments

We thank Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo whose seminar on Transatlantic Political Thought first sowed the seeds of our collaborative work. An earlier version of this article was presented at the International Studies Association’s Annual Convention in Toronto in 2014. We thank everyone on the panel and in the audience for their stimulating engagement with our work. We owe special thanks to Charles W. Mills for his tremendously encouraging dis- cussant feedback. We would also like to express our gratitude to Randolph Persaud, R.B.J. Walker, Himadeep Muppidi, Narendran Kumarakulasingam, Raymond Duvall, Nancy Luxon, Robbie Shilliam and Naeem Inaya- tullah for their critical questions and comments on our various drafts. We could not incorporate all of their sug- gestions into the article, but they have been very helpful in pushing our long-term thinking on decolonial conversations and entanglements among colonized subjects.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica- tion of this article.

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Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. All translations of quotes in this article from Spanish, French, and Vietnamese into English are ours, unless otherwise noted. This quote is available in Spanish, accessed June 18, 2015, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/ discursos/1976/esp/f190476e.html, our emphasis.

2. See Sankaran Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations,” Alternatives 26 (2001): 401–24; Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in Inter- national Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004).

3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 4. We borrow the idea of alternative global designs from Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,”

Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 179–210. See also Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5. See, for example, Randolph Persaud, “Fanon, Race, and World Order,” in Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, ed. Stephen Gill and James Mittelman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170–83; Himadeep Muppidi, “Frantz Fanon,” in Critical Theorists and International Relations, ed. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (London, UK: Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, “A Fanonian Critique of Lebow’s Cultural Theory of International Relations,” Millennium 38, no. 1 (2009): 117–36.

6. See relevant chapters in Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ed., Decolonizing International Relations (Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and Non-western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2011).

7. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 26.

8. Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations, 1. 9. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris, France: Éditions Gallimard, 1990), 88. 10. Glissant, Poétique, 107. 11. See José Martí, “Un Paseo por la Tierra de Los Anamitas,” in Obras Completas (vol. 18), ed. José Martí (La

Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991), 462. Henceforth, Martí’s completed work is abbre- viated as OC.

12. See C. Neale Ronning, José Martí and the Emigré Colony in Key West: Leadership and State Formation (New York: Praeger, 1990).

13. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 47. 14. Joseph-Anténor Firmin, Lettres de Saint-Thomas: Études Sociologiques, Historiques et Littéraires (Paris,

France: V. Giard & E. Briere, 1910), 115–16. 15. Việt Nam was called An Nam prior to formal independence from France in 1945. 16. Martí, OC, vol. 20, 147. The original text has only masculine pro/nouns. 17. See an influential critique of historicism in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial

Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 6–11. 18. “Three Heroes,” a biographical account of these independence leaders, inaugurated the July 1889 issue of

The Golden Years. 19. Martí’s writings in general are not free of Orientalist tropes, but this story presents a crucial departure. 20. We refer here to Spurr’s insight, “The problem of the colonizer is in some sense the problem of the writer: in

the face of what may appear as a vast cultural and geographical blankness, colonization is a form of self- inscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived of as an extension of the landscape.” David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 7.

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21. See Morrison’s review of a novel by Guinean writer Camara Laye, whose portrait of Africa contrasts with the dominant representation in the West, in Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, ed. Carolyn Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 123, 128.

22. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 461–62, our emphasis. 23. Ibid., 463. 24. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), 28. 25. Quoted in Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),

120. In his speeches, writings, and especially his will, Hồ also reiterated the certainty of victory that would belong to his people’s resistance struggle against the United States.

26. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 464. 27. Hồ Chí Minh, Toàn Tập (vol. 1) (Hà Nội, Vietnam: National Politics Publishing House, 2002), 399.

Henceforth, the completed work is abbreviated as HCM, TT. 28. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 467. 29. Ibid., 468. 30. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4. 31. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 460. 32. James Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 78. 33. Martí, OC, vol. 18, 468, our emphasis. 34. Ibid., 470. 35. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 130–32. 36. Ibid., 126–27. 37. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 23–34. 38. Ibid., 246–48. 39. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 40. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 154–55, 134, 474–93. 41. Ibid., 337–40. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, 306–12 and vol. 2, 351. 43. Ibid., vol. 1, 87–90. 44. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1985), Part Two. 45. “President Urges Readiness and Patience,” The White House, September 15, 2001, accessed June 18, 2015,

http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915-4.html. 46. See a more extensive analysis of intercolonialism in “L’Enfumé” and Hồ’s other writings in Brent Hayes

Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows,” Positions 11, no. 1 (2003): 11–49. 47. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 115–20. 48. Ibid., 32. 49. Ibid., vol. 1, 40–45 and vol. 2, 321–23. 50. Ibid., vol. 1, 215–16 and vol. 2, 327–29, 333–36. 51. Ibid., vol. 1, 233–35. 52. Ibid., vol. 2, 327–29. 53. Ibid., 120. 54. Ibid., vol. 1, 169–71. 55. Ibid., 465. 56. Ibid., 217–19. 57. Ibid., 288–89, 447, 452. 58. Ibid., 283–89. 59. Ibid., 253–58, 283–89. 60. Ibid., vol. 2, 152–53, 176–81. 61. Ibid., 180, 182–202, 308–18.

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62. Ibid., 166–69. 63. Ibid., 330–32. 64. Ibid., 417–37. 65. See an excellent study of anti-imperialist historiography among colonized intellectuals in Edwards, “The

Shadow of Shadows,” 2003. 66. HCM, TT, vol. 2, 286. 67. Ibid., vol. 1, 273. 68. The translated quote is reproduced from Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years 1919–1941

(London, UK: Hurst, 2003), 56. See also HCM, TT, vol. 1, 279. 69. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 263–64. 70. Ibid. Hồ’s desire for mutual learning reminds us of former Indonesian President Sukarno’s address at the

Asia–Africa Conference in 1955: “Yes, we have so much in common, and yet we know so little of each other.” See Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia, ed., Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung (Djakarta, Indonesia: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955).

71. Ibid. 72. Quoted in Yevgeny Kobelev, Ho Chi Minh (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1989), 51. 73. See Gilly’s Introduction to Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 18. 74. Ibid., 15. 75. Gayatri Spivak, interviewed by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Naked Punch, June 2006, accessed June 18, 2015,

http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/21. 76. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2003), 35. 77. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 15–23. 78. Ibid., vol. 8, 442. 79. Martínez-Echazábal discusses howMartí’s egalitarian advocacy contrasts with the racism of his various con-

temporaries. For example, José Anonio Saco (1797–1879), an influential Cuban intellectual and political figure, urged miscegenation to “neutralize, to a certain degree, the terrible influence of the three million Negroes surrounding us, millions that keep on multiplying, and that may swallow us up in the not too distant future, if we remain idle.” See Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, ““Martí and Race”: A Re-evaluation,” in Re- reading José Martí (1853–1895): One Hundred Years Later, ed. Julio Rodríguez-Luis (Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1999), 115–26. See also Fernando Ortiz y Fernandez, “Cuba, Martí and the Race Problem,” Phylon 3, no. 3 (1942): 253–76.

80. Thomas Ward, “From Sarmiento to Martí and Hostos: Extricating the Nation from Coloniality,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 83 (October 2007): 83–104.

81. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 18. 82. Ibid., vol. 18, 371. 83. Ibid., vol. 10, 323. 84. Ibid., 323–24. 85. Retamar historicizes Martí’s exaltation of subaltern peoples as an indispensable element of patria as

follows. In the 1890s, the creole revolutionary classes that had fought the wars of independence during Bolívar’s time were no longer in Latin America. Defeated in the Cuban independence struggles fought between 1868 and 1878, the Cuban agrarian bourgeoisie withdrew its support from the struggle and reconciled with the prospect of being ruled by Spain or the United States. Martí’s anti-imperial struggle consequently turned to small proprietors, tobacco farmers, professionals, the incipient working class, poor peasants, and the recently freed slaves for support. See Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Martí in His (Third) World,” Boundary 2 36 (March 2009): 61–94, 73.

86. Martí’s advocacy of social betterment for Native Americans is revealing: “Either we help the Indian get started or his weight will impede our march.” Quoted in Ortiz y Fernandez, “Cuba, Martí and the Race Prob- lem,” 266.

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87. Martí, OC, vol. 10, 327. 88. Ibid., vol. 2, 108. 89. Ibid., vol. 3, 27. 90. For a critique of how Martí echoed racial policies in the nineteenth century that aimed to acculturate those

inferiorized, see Jorge Camacho, Etnografía Política y Poder a Finales del Siglo XIX: José Martí y la Cues- tión Indígena (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 16.

91. Martí, OC, vol. 6, 283. 92. For an excellent analysis of the conception of waste and value in Locke’s theory and in liberalism more

broadly, see Vinay Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), chap. 1, 1–31.

93. José Martí, Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 145.

94. Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalism in Early Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 25–26. Ada Ferrer contextualizes the silence of race in Cuban nationalism during the 1890s in relation to the increasing presence and leadership of black and mulatto insurgents in rebellions against Spain, which fueled white Cubans’ fear of “black ascendancy” and “race war,” aggravated by colonial manipulation. See Ada Ferrer, “The Silence of Patriots: Race and Nationalism in Martí’s Cuba,” in José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 232–36.

95. Quoted in Ferrer, “The Silence of Patriots,” 236. 96. Ferrer persuasively argues, “The silence was active: it was an argument, a slogan, a fantasy.” Ferrer, “The

Silence of Patriots,” 231. 97. Martí, OC, vol. 5, 325–326. 98. Martí, Our America, 259. 99. Ibid., 314. 100. Ibid., 208. 101. Ibid., 312. 102. Ibid., 208. 103. See an insightful study of Martí’s problematic framing of racial issues, which Fernando Ortiz repro-

duces in his speech “Cuba, Martí and the Race Problem,” in Martínez-Echazábal, ““Martí and Race,”” 115–26.

104. Martí, Our America, 313. 105. For an instructive analysis of post-racialism’s erasure of race in the United States’ right-wing as well as

liberal discourses, see Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (July 2011): 1253–352.

106. Martí, Our America, 259. 107. For instance, mulatto journalist Juan Gualberto Gómez (1854–1933), a plantation-born Afro-Cuban leader

in the war of independence against Spain, founded several newspapers that promoted racial equality. Diver- ging from Martí, with whom he had a long friendship and close collaboration, he vocally tackled questions of race, “I know well that some consider this problem [race] so dreadful, that they consider imprudent any- one who proclaims its existence, imagining with an incomparable naiveté (candor) that the best way to resolve certain questions is not to study or even to examine them.” Quoted in Ferrer, “The Silence of Patri- ots,” 237. Still, fellow Afro-Cubans severely criticized Gómez for opposing the formation of a black polit- ical party, especially in the first years of the independent republic.

108. The Haitian Constitution proclaims, “[a]ll acception [sic] of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence for- ward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” Quoted in Siba Grovogui, “To the Orphaned, Dispossessed, and Illegitimate Children: Human Rights beyond Republican and Liberal Traditions,” Indi- ana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 57.

172 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40(2)

109. Brenda Plummer similarly notes, “Cubanidad sought to displace blackness, but not whiteness. The con- scious Haitian invention of noir as a political category sought to make normative what the colonialists had rendered monstrous.” See Brenda Plummer, “Firmin and Martí at the Intersection of Pan-Americanism and Pan-Africanism,” in José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 220.

110. See an illuminating analysis of the revolutionary implications of the mandate that the inhabitants of Haiti be generically called “black” in Grovogui, “To the Orphaned,” 41–63.

111. We use “peasant” as an equivalent of “nông dân,” which means agricultural people in Vietnamese. 112. Martí, OC, vol. 20, 147. 113. HCM, TT, vol. 1, 209. 114. Ibid., vol. 7, 15. 115. See, for example, Ibid., 146, 167, 179. 116. Ibid., 28–29, 62. 117. Ibid., 29. 118. Ibid., 212. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 28. 121. Martí, OC, vol. 19, 100. 122. Ibid. 123. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2000). 124. Anne Sauvagnargues, “Le délit de solidarité, une atteinte à la dignité,” Libération, November 19, 2009,

accessed June 18, 2015, http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2009/11/19/le-delit-de-solidarite-une-atteinte- a-la-dignite_594440.

125. We are grateful for Charles Mills’ inspiring discussant comments on our earlier draft presented at the 2014 International Studies Association.

Author Biographies

Quỳnh N. Phạm is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include “Enduring Bonds: Politics and Life outside Freedom as Autonomy,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38 (1) in 2013 and coauthored articles with Himadeep Muppidi in Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, eds., Claiming the International (Routledge, 2013), Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (Columbia University Press, 2012), and Naeem Inayatullah, ed., Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR (Routledge, 2011).

María José Méndez is in the PhD program in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include postcolonial approaches to the questions of indigeneity and sovereignty as well as theorizations on contemporary global capitalism and the resistance to its effects. Her disserta- tion explores the politics of death and the political economy of the drug wars in Latin America, with particular attention to the multiple ways in which subaltern groups contest and navigate the evolving landscape of massacres and narco-capitalist accumulation.

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