Cambodian and Grenadian Feminist Internationalisms Against U.S. Imperialism

-----

About the talk

This talk unpacks the stakes of internationalist feminist struggle against a U.S. imperial discourse of regret and its material consequences. It takes foundational Cambodian/American feminist scholar Cathy Schlund-Vials’s juxtaposition of diasporic feminist responses to U.S. invasions of Cambodia and Grenada as an occasion to unpack an internationalist feminist politics between these sites of imperial violence. Where regret is wielded as one in a range of imperial grammars that attempt to control space and time, how does and must feminist work and political community read the past as a terrain of struggle? Toward this question, this talk reads the mobilization of regret within the politics of Cold War U.S. imperial violence in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean as a tactic of compartmentalization - against which Mitamura turns to Schlund-Vial’s formation of ‘refusing to disremember' and entwined anticolonial practice as powerful internationalist feminist rejoinders to U.S. imperialism then and now.

-----