A GEOS Colloquium Talk by
The Center for Place, Culture and Politics Postdoctoral Fellow

Christina Heatherton

Thursday, December 5, 2013
5:30pm
Science Center Room 4102

Reception to follow in Room 4304

Following the outbreak of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ongoing Mexican Revolution, the U.S. dramatically expanded its security infrastructure. This period saw the production of the first federal police system, the first massive domestic intelligence program, and the passage of broad federal legislation against sedition and espionage. As a result, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas became home to a unique mix of soldiers, war dissenters, radical labor organizers, race rebels, and foreign-born radicals. Among them were pacifists, Wobblies, members of the Ghadar movement, and Mexican Revolutionary leaders like Ricardo Flores Magòn, who had been incarcerated for his trenchant critiques of U.S. imperialism. This talk will observe how imprisoned revolutionaries and working class soldiers coordinated night schools, produced their own newspaper, maintained a radical library, led May Day marches, initiated strikes, and continued agitating and educating one another in the prison. Drawing from prison records, private book collections, correspondence, memoirs, and federal surveillance files, it will explore the unanticipated alliances and political struggles that arose from this unique convergence space. By viewing the penitentiary as a microcosm of antiracist and anti-capitalist struggles in the period, it will explore how the color line and the class struggle were both understood, experienced, and resisted during this moment. It will subsequently describe how a unique form of radical internationalism was theorized both within and against the penitentiary as well as against this emerging racialized security infrastructure.

Dr. Christina Heatherton is an interdisciplinary scholar of social movements and political theory. She is the author of The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution, Internationalism, and the American Century (forthcoming) and is currently editing a volume entitled The World Refuses: Global Struggles Against Racism and Imperialism, 1893-1933. She is also the co-founder of Freedom Now Books an independent publishing company dedicated to collaborations between scholars, activists, and artists. She is the editor of Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (2011) and the co-editor with Jordan T. Camp of Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (2012). She is the recipient of multiple awards for research and activism and also serves as a Global Advisory Board member of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sponsored by the Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences as part of the GEOS Colloquium Series