Table Of ContentInventing the Third World
Histories of Internationalism
Series Editors:
Jessica Reinisch, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
David Brydan, King’s College London, UK
Editorial Board:
Tomoko Akami, Australian National University, Australia
Martin Conway, University of Oxford, UK
Adom Getachew, University of Chicago, USA
Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham, UK
Su Lin Lewis, University of Bristol, UK
Erez Manela, Harvard University, USA
Samuel Moyn, Yale University, USA
Alanna O’Malley, Leiden University, Netherlands
Kiran Klaus Patel, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany
Tehila Sasson, Emory University, USA
Frank Trentmann, Birkbeck University of London, UK
Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia, Canada
This book series features cutting-edge research on the history of international cooperation
and internationalising ambitions in the modern world. Providing an intellectual home
for research into the many guises of internationalism, its titles draw on methods and
insights from political, social, cultural, economic and intellectual history. It showcases
a rapidly expanding scholarship which has begun to transform our understanding of
internationalism and the modern world.
Cutting across established academic fields such as European, World, International
and Global History, the series critically examines historical perceptions of geography,
regions, centres, peripheries, borderlands and connections across space in the history of
internationalism. It includes both monographs and edited volumes that shed new light on
local and global contexts for international projects; the impact of class, race and gender on
international aspirations; the roles played by a variety of international organisations and
institutions; and the hopes, fears, tensions and conflicts underlying them.
The series is published in association with Birkbeck’s Centre for the Study of
Internationalism, and edited by Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck) and David Brydan (King’s
College London).
Published:
Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of
International Public Administration, 1920-1960s, edited by Karen Gram-Skjoldager,
Haakon Andreas Ikonomou & Torsten Kahlert
Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica
Reinsich and David Brydan
International Cooperation in Cold War Europe: The United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe, 1947-64, by Daniel Stinsky
Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World,
edited by Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder & Benjamin Thorpe
Forthcoming:
Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World?, edited by Samantha K. Knapton and
Katherine Rossy
Inventing the Third World
In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South
Edited by
Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface viii
Foreword: On the Threshold of the Third World Homi K. Bhabha 1
Introduction: Imagining the Third World: Genealogies of Alternative Global
Histories Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman 7
1 The Third World before Afro-Asia Cindy Ewing 29
2 From Peace to National Liberation: Mexico and the
Tricontinental Patrick Iber 45
3 A Voice for the Yugoslavs in Latin America: Oscar Waiss and the
Yugoslav-Chilean Connection Agustín Cosovschi 65
4 The End of Ideology and the Third World: The Congress for Cultural
Freedom’s 1955 Milan Conference on the “Future of Freedom” and its
Aftermath Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins 83
5 Latin American Network in Exile: A Communist Cultural Legacy for the
Third World Marcelo Ridenti 99
6 Radical Scholarship and Political Activism: Walter Rodney as Third
World Intellectual and Historian of the Third World Andreas Eckert 117
7 From London 1948 to Dakar 1966: Crises in Anticolonial
Counterpublics Penny M. Von Eschen 137
8 Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in
Color Atreyee Gupta 155
9 Listening to the Cold War in Bombay Naresh Fernandes 181
10 Imagining a Progressive World: Soviet Visual Culture in Postcolonial
India Jessica Bachman 195
11 The Battle of Conferences: Cultural Decolonization and Global Cold
War Monica Popescu 219
12 The Death of the Third World Revisited: Curative Democracy and
World-Making in Late 1970s India Srirupa Roy 239
Coda Samuel Moyn 261
List of Contributors 267
Index 269
Figures
6.1 German edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 119
6.2 Rodney and future WPA members exit the Ministry of Labour
and Social Security, Guyana, c. 1971 129
8.1 F. N. Souza, Mystical Ebony, 1965 156
8.2 F. N. Souza, Reclining Nude, 1954 158
8.3 F. N. Souza, Negro in Mourning, 1957 159
8.4 F. N. Souza, Louis Armstrong, 1956 160
8.5 Artist unknown, St. Francis Xavier Baptizing a Paravar Pearl Fisher,
seventeenth century 163
8.6 F. N. Souza, Nyasa Negress with Flowers of Thorns, 1959 164
8.7 F. N. Souza, Untitled, 1965 167
8.8 F. N. Souza, Untitled, 1964–5 168
8.9 Tony Evans, Souza in His Studio, 1965 169
8.10 Crispin Eurich, Souza, 1964 170
8.11 F. N. Souza, Sketchbook, 1963 171
8.12 Exhibition catalog, Black Art and Other Paintings, 1966 172
8.13 Exhibition catalog with silver coating scratched out, Black Art
and Other Paintings, 1966 173
9.1 American pianist Teddy Weatherford and his band in 1938, featuring
both American and Indian musicians 183
9.2 Trumpet player Chic Chocolate—the Louis Armstrong of India—and his
band in Bombay, c. 1948 184
9.3 Dave Brubeck jams with Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan in Bombay 189
9.4 Indian pianist Lucila Pacheco with Duke Ellington 190
10.1 Press clipping of a Soviet book exhibition held in Cannanore (Kannur),
Kerala, 1979 199
10.2 Second Urdu edition of Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov’s
novel Jamila 201
10.3 Half title page of Soviet Turkmenistan, 1956 203
10.4 Black-and-white photographs from Soviet Turkmenistan, 1956 204
10.5 Aleksandr Melent’evich Volkov, Earth and Sky, 1961 205
10.6 Photographic portraits of Soviet space dogs in M. Baranova and
Konstantin Veltistov, Rags, Borya and the Rocket: A Tale of Homeless
Dogs and How They Became Famous, 1964 206
10.7 Patrice Lumumba: Fighter for Africa’s Freedom, 1961 207
10.8a Dust jacket of the book Ernesto Che Guevara, 1976 207
10.8b Portrait of Che Guevara on the frontispiece of Ernesto
Che Guevara, 1976 208
Figu res vii
10.9 Portrait of Ho Chi Minh from Yevgeny Kobelev, Ho Chi Minh, 1989 208
10.10 Hand-drawn portraits of Lenin and Marx on a backdrop
used for the Communist Party of India’s State Conference
in Kollam, Kerala, 1975 210
10.11 Black-and-white plate of the Soviet author Maxim Gorky on the
frontispiece of The Birth of Man, 1957 211
10.12 One of many Patrice Lumumba plates in Patrice Lumumba: Fighter for
Africa’s Freedom, 1961 213
Preface
The end of the Second World War and the eclipse of empires brought a wave of efforts
to reimagine the world in the future tense. Nation-states emerging from the shadows
of colonial rule gathered at Bandung to chart alternative destinies and to challenge
global inequalities. The result was nothing less than an effort to reimagine the world
order in a way that stood in direct contrast to the liberal regime designed in Bretton
Woods and in San Francisco as the Second World War drew to a close. Anticolonialism
and development dreaming envisioned a less hierarchical, more pluralistic, and more
distributive arrangement. As the current world order gets caught ever more tightly
into an impasse, this volume looks back at the proliferating alternative visions under
the mantle of the Third World. Avoiding the tendency to treat alternatives as doomed,
utopian projects, the volume seeks to recover the world-changing aspirations of the
Third World project as well as its cultural and intellectual breakthroughs.
By inventing the Third World, writers, artists, musicians, and photographers sought
to create new institutions of solidarity, new expressions, and alternative narratives
than the liberal and/or imperial ones they had inherited. In so doing, they also
created substitute channels, networks, and associations to circulate and exchange their
insights, ideas, and cultural production from universities to book prizes, foundations
and literary festivals, magazines and movies, many of which moved across borders
but outside the dominant circuitry of what we now call the Global North. They built
a nonaligned movement to strike a different path from Cold War geopolitics. Equally
important, writers, artists, photographers, and musicians experimented with cultures
of hope and possibility. Viewed from different points in what we now call the Global
South, or what was then called—in a triumphal chorus—the Third World, there
was a search for new meanings of freedom, self-determination, and the promise of
development. Out of this moment came efforts in the South to create new histories of
global relations (Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and dependency
theory), new heroes and icons (Che Guevara, Napalm Girl), new repertoires (Little
Red Books, photos of atrocity in Sharpeville, or Saigon), and new genres (Mumbai
jazz, the tropical novel). Such aspirations for collective freedom and justice coexisted
and competed with the ideals of individual rights and artistic and cultural freedom
globally disseminated by LIFE, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. At once
nationally rooted and internationally oriented, these projects placed the promises of
decolonization and struggles for social and racial justice at the center of global history.
These efforts to remake the world constituted a new epoch that intersected with and
thus altered the trajectories of the global Cold War. In this sense, this volume flips the
traditional narrative that locates the struggle over decolonization within a framework
of East-West conflict and instead embeds the Cold War within a longer epic over
empire.
Pref ace ix
The chapters in this anthology were presented and discussed at a workshop in the
Princeton Institute for Regional and International Studies, featuring colleagues from
the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. During that gathering,
we explored the global history of the Cold War era from perspectives outside its
usual framing and focus on actors outside geopolitical war rooms. Our theme was
the yearnings for freedom in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from around the time
of the post–Second World War decolonization to the late 1970s. At a time when
globalization is met with retreats to national borders, we asked participants to revisit
the moment when national freedom projects were unabashedly international because
they envisioned alternative world orders and to explore the historical conditions
of their possibility. The chapters ranged from studies of visual culture, literature, and
journalism to the circulation of academic writings and art exhibitions. The sum of all
these parts affirmed the existence of cultural understandings of freedom in the Third
World and a shared search for alternative world orders, and thus enables readers to gain
insight into a radically different “global cultural cold war” than the one we commonly
associate with the East-West divide. It will show that the period that is customarily
defined as the Cold War era was also marked by attempts to inaugurate a different
epoch—one to achieve global racial and social justice and imagined a different kind
of peace. The editors would especially like to express their appreciation to the staff of
the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, its Director and our
colleague and collaborator, Stephen Kotkin, to Poorvi Bellur for her assistance on the
final stages, and to the wonderful editors at Bloomsbury.
