Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin, and Francesca Burke Transnational solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties (Manchester University Press 2022) Introduction Transnational solidarity in the long sixties Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526161574.00007 pp 1–26. In May and June of 2020 hundreds of thousands of people around the world took to the streets in solidarity with protests in the United States against homicidal police brutality and the systemic racism that underpins it. People chanted ‘George Floyd! Say his name! Say his name!’ in anger and in condemnation of the brutal murder of an unarmed African American man, George Floyd, by a white police officer. The familiarity of this phone-captured image of black death did not diminish its capacity to horrify. Elsewhere, Floyd’s portrait was drawn on derelict walls in war-torn Idlib, Syria and on Israel’s apartheid wall in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. In Derry, graffiti quoting Martin Luther King Jr. that ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’ appeared in solidarity with the protesters in the US. Lebanese activists sent a ‘quick guide’ of protest tactics via Twitter signed ‘From #Lebanon to #Minneapolis, solidarity everywhere’. In Chile, an illustration of Floyd alongside Camilo Catrillanca, a 24-year-old indigenous Mapuche man killed by Chilean police in 2018, was circulating on social media platforms. 1 Palestinians also saw in Floyd’s lethal stranglehold at the hands of the police, the violent techniques that the Israeli state enacts against them. 2 Public expressions of transnational solidarity erupted across a range of contexts in which protest movements had been mobilising. The widespread political and affective identifications with Floyd were articulated with local demands for social justice and struggles against racism. Demonstrators in the UK, for example, carried placards insisting that the ‘UK is not innocent’ and challenged the ways in which historical figures were remembered and commemorated in public spaces which valorised and lionised British imperial history. Most obviously this was manifested in the toppling of the statue of the Atlantic slaver Edward Colston in Bristol. Rallies opened up the many silences around British imperial history and developed into increasingly pressing calls to ‘decolonise’ cultural institutions, knowledge frameworks and curricula. These contemporary instances of border crossing anti-racist solidarity attest to the historical erasures and unfinished decolonisation projects that belie our supposedly postcolonial time. Indeed, some of the symbolic moments of solidarity in transnational circulation today bear an uncanny resemblance to – and often explicitly reclaim – the political contestations 1 Jorge Poblete and Patrick J. McDonnell, ‘For Many Chileans, U.S. Demonstrations Spark Reminders of Impassioned Chile Protests’, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 2020. 2 Ahmed Masoud, ‘Let’s Measure the Exact Angle: A Palestinian Perspective on the Maxine Peake controversy’, Ceasefire, online magazine, posted on 30 June 2020, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/lets-measure-exact- angle/.