A major problem of the twenty-first century will be the crisis of diverse, often competing, social/cultural identities among people uprooted by corrosively powerful global economic combines. This crisis will be significant not just in itself, but because it has the direct consequence of undermining coordinated resistance to the destructiveness of globalized systems of power. In an era rushing toward mindless materialism, propelled by powerful, unfeeling economic syndicates that uproot body and soul, more and more people will seek refuge in compartmentalized forms of social identity. However, the search for safety in such sealed compartments is by itself largely illusory. Fragmented,...

Today, huge and growing systems of economic domination continue their profit-driven bulldozer crush across the world. As some small portions of national populations are absorbed into affluent class positions, increasing numbers of people are relegated to disease-ridden paramilitary-controlled backwaters of the free-market mainstream. From rain forests to sweat-shops, from Siberia to the Amazon, from the hydroelectric dam flooding of the Indigenous lands of the Sami in Scandinavia and the Cree in Québec to the chemically wrecked bodies of young women working in the U.S.-owned electronics factories in northern Mexico—from all the compass points, in a staggering variety of forms,...

Before proceeding with this discussion of transcommunality, I will speak about my ancestors. It is from them that I have received the desire to contribute to the best of my ability to what I hope is constructive cooperation leading to justice, equality, and peace in the world. I owe it to them to make these comments. That which I say in these pages flows from two great currents, the African and the Native American, whose conflux runs through my family and infuses my spirit today. In 1992, when my wife, my mother, and I went to visit my family in...

Transcommunal cooperation emphasizes coordinated heterogeneity across “identity lines”—not only of “ethnicity,” “race,” “class,” and “gender,” but also of organizationally, philosophically, and cosmologically diverse settings. Transcommunality entails a changed way of thinking, a paradigm shift or, to use the Andean Indigenous terminology,Pachakuteq, “a change of direction” (Delgado, 1994, 1). Transcommunality moves beyond the classic Eurocentric, progressive emphasis on homogenizing unity based on the leadership of a “vanguard party,” while also escaping from aimless ever-splintering relativism of the postmodern perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. As Gilles Deleuze says, in another context, it is not enough to say “Long live the...

There is nothing fundamentally new about the mode of cooperation that is at the heart of transcommunality. We can learn from many historic and contemporary examples of the phenomenon.¹ Because of the wealth of detailed information available, I want to focus here on the system of thought and organization of the Haudenosaunee or “Iroquois” people. However, it is important to recognize that the Haudenosaunee are part of what Georges E. Sioui of the Department of Indian Studies at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College calls “the universality of Amerindian values” that runs like a great current through many Indigenous cultures of the...

With the Haudenosaunee as a pivotal conceptual framework, we can draw out key elements of transcommunality and schematically delineate them in the ways described below.

In classic Haudenosaunee society, respectful speech and listening form an essential path by which honest positions and feelings can be circulated within the society. The Mother of the Nations says to the Peacemaker that his “words are good,” but then immediately she asks, “But what form will these words take when they come to be in the world?” Those who speak and those who listen are cognizant of the various requirements that mitigate against anger...

Transcommunality is a practical mode of interaction that crosses and draws from distinctly rooted group locations or “emplacements.” Transcommunality draws from the resource of the particularistic affiliations of its interacting participants. Being rooted in shared and tangible everyday actions, sometimes of the most minute kind, transcommunal activists do not depend completely on abstract slogans of unity. Instead, they actualize coordination through direct interpersonal relations in which the reputations of all involved are proven through their own actions. Transcommunality is process—often difficult, slow, and even defeated at certain moments—that constantly creates, and when necessary rebuilds, structures of commonality among...

Transcommunality emphasizes openness to many voices, many places. Consequently, I would undermine the very essence of this concept were I to present it only through my voice. I do not want a monologue about dialogue. So I invited a range of perspectives on this notion of transcommunality to be included as part of the book itself. My aspiration here is to add several different vantage points from thoughtful commentators, all of whom are involved in their own places of social justice creativity. But these commentaries do more than simply add on to the book and to each other. Rather they...

“Warring Minorities/Emergent Majorities,” a multiethnic conference organized by Dana Takagi and John Brown Childs in 1994, met at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during the peak year of neoliberal reforms taking place in the globalized world. The conference can now be remembered as inspiring the meditation and contemplation of the notion oftranscommunality. Often the termcontemplationcan be interpreted in a passive way, but I would rather like to invoke itsactiveconnotation, its ability to entice and inspire, to promote mutual understandings frompositions of strength, mediation, and wisdom.

A year before, in 1993, Jeremy Brecher, John...

John Brown Childs’s case for transcommunality is significant most importantly for its courage to hope. Hope in a better future does not come easily these days when what remains of the political left despairs of the relevance to a changed world of the solutions it once espoused, and its putatively radical successors wallow variously in self-inflicted if not self-serving agonies of identity, or in the euphoria of corporate-sponsored sensory overload (“tittytainment,” according to that coiner of puerile slogans, Zbigniew Brzezinsky), neither of which allows for anything beyond an eternal, and eternally fractious, present. Idealism and utopianism are the undesirables of...

John Brown Childs’s stimulating notion of transcommunality raises some old sociological questions regarding the definition and scope of community, as well as more recent discussions on the function of location/placement in the social construction of ethnic identity. The classic sociological distinction put forward by F. Tönnies (1955/1887, cited in Jary and Jary 1991) betweenGemeinschaft(the community of close, intimate relationships, where kinship, a bound and shared territory, and a common culture dominate the social relations) andGesellschaft(translated in English as “society,” where relationships are impersonal, contractual, transitory, and calculative rather than affective) has been enriched by contemporary British...

Drawing from the social philosophies of the Amerindians in general, and the Haudenosaunee of Northern America in particular, John Brown Childs develops what he calls “transcommunal” approaches to global struggles for freedom and justice. Intrinsic to these approaches are communicative actions. These are actions preceded by communication between individuals and groups and communication that results in purposive action. Hereby Childs counters the inward-focused identity politics of the multiculturalisms that dominated academic and juridical debates here in the United States for several decades. Identity politics, as Childs says in his introduction in this book, can “cut off its participants from contact...

John Brown Childs’s short but deep reflections on “transcommunality,” and the web of approaches he articulates for realizing it, in many ways prefigure the worldwide movement that has arisen to challenge globalization. They also provide profound guidance for directions that the movement needs to take. As John Childs writes, “Today, huge and growing systems of economic domination continue their profit-driven bulldozer crush across the world…. [I]ncreasing numbers of people are relegated to disease-ridden, paramilitary-controlled backwaters of the free-market mainstream.‭” That “globalization from above,” however, is now being countered by what has been called “globalization from below.” The 1999 “Battle of...

We live in an age of postcommunality. Does anyone believe in the possibility of genuine community anymore? As we all know, the very concept of community is a product of nostalgic reflection on the disappearance of small-scale social formations—the world of agrarian production, the village, peasant life with its extended family structures, face-to-face exchange systems, and customary linkages destroyed by capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and transnational economies. Today, the ideal of community exists if at all as a rallying cry for groups threatened by assimilation to the exigencies of a transnational market geared to consumerism. In the brave new world...

John Brown Childs’s articulation of transcommunality in many ways echoes for me Bernice Johnson Reagon’s discussion of coalition politics: “You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up with someone who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive” (Reagon, 356–357). What both writers suggest is that the politics of solidarity must be based to a large extent on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds. To develop effective movements for social change, we have to forego the “politics of purity”...

Recently I was invited to give the keynote address at a conference held at a major U.S. university. Organized around the subjects of diaspora, globalization, and identity in the Pacific Islands, the conference attracted a sizable gathering of indigenous and other interested scholars, professionals, and graduate students from the Pacific, Latin America, and the United States. Among the different issues I addressed in my keynote speech was the current rising tide of interethnic militancy in the Pacific Islands. Although the problem is just now being experienced, the underlying causes are long standing and deeply rooted in globalization and colonization. However,...

The late 1960s are seen by many on both the left and the right as the origin of the downward spiral into identity politics, tribalization, and balkanization from which we have yet to recover. Cultural differences and the struggles for recognition and representation that they produced were neither an unhappy accident of history nor a mere cheering fiction. Difference remains a powerful principle of belonging, identification, membership, and struggle. Thus, “identity politics,” which is organized around cultural difference, is a highly contested conceptual, political, and emotional terrain. For some, like critical theorists and neomarxists, difference and the politics of identity...

The idea of transcommunality expressed by John Brown Childs comes at a most opportune time for the Hip Hop nation. As chronicled by the recent media attention to the activism of Hip Hop artists,¹ more headz are getting their politic on. Whether it’s graffiti writers tagging “No More Prisons” on side-walks throughout the nation or independent record labels such as Raptivism Records and Clockwork Productions releasing socially conscious music, the progressive citizens of the Hip Hop community are determined to return the subculture back to its roots in resistance. Such efforts raise awareness of and create opportunities for collaborating across...

The family history that John Brown Childs sets down inTranscommunalityleads effectively to the case made for Native American peace making, which itself is interwoven with the case made for transcommunality as a peace-making technique. The movement is between the general and particular, between local family history and abstract peace-making skills. Regarding transcommunality as a peace-making approach, I would raise a few points for general discussion.

To what extent is Native American peace-making special or unique? Anthropological evidence shows that many preindustrial societies had formal and institutionalized mechanisms for conflict resolution. This is part of the social condition according...

We are in a campground owned by the Tohono O’odham people. It is in Arizona at its southernmost point, about forty miles from the tribal headquarters in Sells. We are fifty years old, a lesbian couple. I am Jewish; my partner is of German heritage. The park caretaker, Mario Puella, greets us. We shake hands. He is driving a king-cab pickup truck with oversized tires and four-wheel drive. He is accompanied by Ramsey, a Blue Hill dog, a breed favored by the Tohono O’odham for its shepherding skills. Mario says it is fine for us to stay, and we fill...