Internationalism in a Time of Empire
Eslanda Goode Robeson died just two days before her seventieth birthday. Her life had already traversed several worlds: born into a lineage shaped by enslavement, migration, and Black political leadership; trained as a chemist; reinvented as an anthropologist, writer, and international organiser. She moved across the fault lines of race, empire, and ideology with a kind of disciplined restlessness. The exhibition and festival Every Artist Must Take Sides – Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin treats her biography like a map of contradictions — and that is precisely its strength.
Rather than sealing the Robesons inside the past, the exhibition as well as the festival treat their work like unfinished business, like historical stress-testing. Archival materials from the Paul Robeson Archive meet contemporary installations, films, and sound works, not to rehearse history but to test its echoes. If, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, this project scrutinises those rhymes under contemporary conditions: the return of authoritarianism, the rebranding of empire, the persistence of racialised borders, and the enduring need for international solidarity.
Eslanda Robeson believed in Soviet anti-racism and anti-colonial rhetoric while witnessing the realities of state power, purges, and Cold War alignments. She championed African self-determination while working inside and against global institutions. She placed faith in communism’s promise of equality even as she watched empires change flags rather than disappear. By centring Eslanda and Paul Robeson, the exhibition frames internationalism as political practice forged in tension. Somewhere between hope and compromise, solidarity and spectacle. The question it quietly asks is what it means for us now to have inherited a vision of justice shaped by both Soviet ideals and the imperial worlds they tried to undo.
The exhibition also does not seem to monumentalise Eslanda and Paul Robeson as solitary heroes. Instead, it foregrounds what the curators present as intellectual friendship: networks of comradeship, study, and shared risk that sustained their work. Their politics appear as practice instead of doctrine, built through letters, speeches, photographs, and travel, and tested in moments of betrayal, contradiction, and moral compromise. The Robesons’ internationalism is shown as a series of difficult alignments made under the pressure of fascism, empire, and Cold War repression.
One of the exhibition’s historical anchors is a moment that seems uncannily calibrated to the present. On 27 January 1963, Eslanda Robeson spoke near the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden at a memorial for victims of fascism. The date already carried heavy symbolism: the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz. But Robeson widened the frame. Fascism, she argued, did not live only in Europe’s ruins. It lived in forced segregation in the United States, in the denial of passports, and in the policing of dissent in Cold War exclusions. Racism, antisemitism, and fascism were not separate problems. They were interconnected regimes of dehumanisation.
This relational thinking structures the exhibition. Archival documents are not presented less as sealed relics than as conceptual instruments: lynching in the U.S. is read alongside colonial violence in Africa; McCarthyism alongside the criminalisation of anti-fascist struggle; Cold War borders alongside racialised hierarchies. Rather than isolating oppression into national stories, the exhibition retains their kinship. What emerges is a presentation of politics organised around relations rather than flags.
Politics is drawn through links, not lines.
This is where the project turns from history toward futurity. The archive is treated as metabolising matter: something to be translated and displaced, not merely preserved. Contemporary artists do not illustrate the past but argue with it. They ask what its unfinished questions demand now: how solidarities are forged across difference, how voice becomes a political instrument, and how struggles invent their own languages of care & resistance. Past and present resonate, doubling down on the urgency of the present moment.
Because resonance matters in a year like this one. Trump has now been back in office for a year, and the world feels structurally louder and morally thinner. Authoritarian politics normalise themselves by repetition. Borders harden while being sold as security. Dissent is redescribed as disruption. Neutrality becomes a career path. In this context, the exhibition’s title Every Artist Must Take Sides reads more like a diagnosis than instructions.
What makes the Robesons newly legible today is not simply their courage but the conditions under which they worked. Their internationalism developed inside an imperial order that restricted where knowledge could circulate and whose voices could count. Comparable pressures now operate through digital platforms and economies of visibility. Contemporary American imperialism no longer relies primarily on colonies but on discourse: on defining which struggles become intelligible and which remain noise.
The United States functions as a gravitational center of political meaning. Neo-fascism becomes “Trump” rather than Orbán or Le Pen. Trans rights and intersectionality are narrated through U.S. debates before being exported elsewhere. English becomes the price of admission. U.S. universities become the sites where Global South thinkers must be housed in order to be recognized. Even critiques of American power reproduce its centrality, because the U.S. remains the reference point of explanation. It is a black hole of political discourse, absorbing global difference into its own narrative.
The contradiction is sharp: struggle inside the “belly of the beast” is necessary, but it is then mistaken for the universal struggle. Political strategies and moral vocabularies are assumed to travel outward from the U.S. to the rest of the world. Internationalism becomes formally global but substantively American.
Against this backdrop, the Robesons appear not as nostalgic figures but as methodological ones. Their work suggests that decolonizing internationalism cannot mean simply opposing U.S. policy. It must mean decentring U.S. epistemology — refusing to treat American categories as universal, refusing to assume that understanding the U.S. means understanding the world. It requires turning toward endogenous intellectual traditions without waiting for their certification by empire.
The exhibition keeps this tension visible. By bringing contemporary practices into contact with archival materials, it situates present struggles inside longer histories of coalition and constraint. It proposes transgenerational consciousness as a political resource: the knowledge that others have worked under comparable pressures, built alliances across difference, and insisted on solidarity when conditions were designed to destroy it.
What ultimately distinguishes Every Artist Must Take Sides is that it does not offer commemoration but rehearsal. It treats internationalism as something that must be practiced again under new conditions — conditions shaped by algorithmic visibility, cultural imperialism, and political exhaustion. In doing so, it suggests that political imagination does not survive by being protected, but by being exercised.
The Robesons’ world was one of extremes. Ours is no less so. The exhibition’s quiet wager is that remembering how internationalism once had to be invented may help us invent it again — this time without routing everything through a single empire, even when that empire is loudly in crisis.
Exhibited artists:
James Gregory Atkinson, Leila Bencharnia, Sonya Clark, Andrii Dostliev & Lia Dostlieva, Ângela Ferreira, Masimba Hwati, patricia kaersenhout, Ariel Orah, Kirsten Reese, Matana Roberts, Dread Scott, Katharina Warda
Every Artist Must Take Sides: Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson at Akademie der Künste
Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
more info here
