Dr. Mahmood Mamdani is a distinguished public intellectual who has made important scholarly contributions to colonial and post-colonial theory, African politics, and a range of critical contemporary issues such as the "war on terror" and the roots of genocide. Dr. Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the School of International and Public Affairs and Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University. He maintains his involvement with the intellectualand political life of his native Uganda as Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University, in Kampala. Dr. Mamdani has written a number of important books that address the intersection between culture, identity, power, and politics, including Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and The Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001), Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2005), and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2010).

Drawing on fieldwork that begun in the US heartland in the world-changing year of 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall dramatically ended the long epoch of the Cold War, this paper attempts to demonstrate a long historical view of labor struggles within this ethnographic context.

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky