Radical Americas editorial

Chile’s 2019 uprising marked a moment of social awakening for many Chileans, recasting historical memory tropes and shattering the fear of collective action internalised during the years of dictatorial rule (1973–90). This article explores the political legacies of the Popular Unity period (1970–3) made apparent during the 2019 uprising and the popular movement that emerged in its wake. It also centres on the Chilean feminist movement, its historic role as a political force in Chilean politics and how a new feminist discourse became the necessary preamble to Chile’s 2019 social awakening. Lastly, this study describes the sprouting of a neighbourhood assembly movement within days after the 18 October 2019 uprising, its role in rearticulating politics from below and its alignment with the feminist movement, culminating in mass participation in the 8 March 2020 feminist strike. This article places personal and familial accounts in conversation with scholarly works, utilising the 2019 uprising as a lens to revisit the historical past within the onward moving historical present.

Our understanding of the international and transnational history of Chile during the Unidad Popular (UP) government has expanded considerably since the early 2010s. But what has new research contributed to our understanding of events in Chile and Chile’s significance in a global context? Examining the historiographical advances and questions that have driven scholarship in recent years, this article argues that international and transnational studies that focus attention on Chile and Chileans can offer new perspectives on the rise and fall of the UP. Rather than reducing international histories to an account of a select group of foreigners acting on an empty Chilean stage, these approaches foreground local actors and processes, exploring the extent to which Chileans were shaped by a multiplicity of interactions, invitations and inspirations across borders. Localising the global in this way can help us understand the reasons many within Chile conceptualised their goals, projects and actions as they did. It challenges the idea of Chilean exceptionalism. It also undermines right-wing actors’ claims to be acting solely within national frameworks by revealing their own entanglements in translational networks and intellectual imports. Suggesting that we have much still to learn, the article also highlights possible avenues for further research and reflects on the contemporary relevance of the global in Chilean political discourse today.

In 1951, black radical William Patterson presented the United Nations with a petition, emblazoned with the title We Charge Genocide . The document charged the US government with snuffing out tens of thousands of black lives each year, through police violence and the systemic neglect of black citizens’ well-being. While historians have tended to discuss We Charge Genocide as a remarkable but brief episode, the petition built on prior attempts to invoke international law on behalf of African Americans and resonated with later generations of black activists whose political activism transcended more limited and domestic notions of civil rights. These later invocations of the genocide charge spanned the black left, including the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, James Baldwin and black feminists. This essay explores how the historical memory of racial violence, including settler colonialism and the slave trade, inspired an ideologically diverse array of organizations to each connect their experience to global histories of racial oppression. It stresses the internationalist and anticolonial perspective of the genocide charge and its proponents’ economic and transnational critique, thereby contributing to the historiographies of the long civil rights movement and black radicalism. By invoking international law, these black radicals connected the civil rights movement in the US to the struggle for human rights worldwide. Finally, the essay considers how integrating the local, national and global scales of racialized violence and its response enables historians to transnationalize the long civil rights movement paradigm.