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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Preface, Homi Bhabha
Introduction: Imagining the Third World: Genealogies of Alternative Global Histories, Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman
1. The Third World Before Afro-Asia, Cindy Ewing (University of Toronto, Canada)
2. From Peace to National Liberation: Mexico and the Tricontinental, Patrick Iber (University of Wisconsin, USA)
3. A Voice for the Yugoslavs in Latin America: Oscar Waiss and the Yugoslav-Chilean Connection, (Agustín Cosovschi, Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, France)
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, Wesleyan University, USA)
5. Latin American Network in Exile: A Communist Cultural Legacy for the Third World, (Marcelo Ridenti, State University Of Campinas, Brazil)
6. Radical Scholarship and Political Activism: Walter Rodney as Third World Intellectual and Historian of the Third World, (Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University, Germany)
7. From London 1948 to Dakar 1966: Crises in Anticolonial Counterpublics, (Penny M. von Eschen, University of Virginia, USA)
8. Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color, (Atreyee Gupta (University Of California, Berkeley, USA)
9. Listening to the Cold War in Bombay, (Naresh Fernandes (Independent Writer)
10. Imagining a Progressive World: Soviet Visual Culture in Postcolonial India, (Jessica Bachman (University of Washington, USA)
11. The Battle of Conferences: Cultural Decolonisation and Global Cold War, (Monica Popescu, Mcgill University, Canada)
12. The Death of the Third World Revisited: Curative Democracy and World-Making in Late 1970s India, (Srirupa Roy, University Of Göttingen, Germany)
Coda (Samuel Moyn, Yale University, USA)
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jeremy Adelman is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University, USA. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, as well as recognitions for his pioneering teaching at Princeton. Chair of the Princeton History Department for the last four years, he is also the founder of the Council for International Teaching and Research.Gyan Prakash is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University, USA. He is also the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999), and has co-authored a book on world history, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (2002).
Summary
This open access book explores the ways in which the global south reimagined the future world order at the end of the Second World War, and the cultural and intellectual breakthroughs that these new narratives created. The end of the Second World War and the eclipse of empires brought a wave of efforts to reimagine the future world order. When nation states emerging from colonial rule met at Bandung to chart alternative destinies and challenge global inequalities, they hoped to create a less hierarchical, more pluralistic and more distributive world. This volume considers the alternative visions put forth by the third world at the close of WWII to recover their world-changing aspirations as well as its cultural and intellectual breakthroughs.
Demonstrating how the invention of the third world sought to create new institutions of solidarity, new expressions and alternative narratives to the imperial ones that they had inherited, this book reveals how writers, artists, musicians and photographers created networks to circulate and exchange these ideas. Exploring these ideas put forth from various regions of the global south, the chapters trace their 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, icons and genres, and placed the promises of decolonization and struggles for social and racial justice at the centre of global history.
Showing how efforts to remake the world intersected with and altered the trajectories of the global Cold War, Inventing the Third World discusses how this conflict existed outside of the traditional east-west framework and offers an insight into a radically different ‘global cultural cold war’. It shows that the Cold War era was marked by attempts to bring about a different world order that would achieve global racial, social justice and a different kind of peace.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open Access was funded by Princeton University, USA.
Foreword
An edited collection that explores the ways in which the global south reimagined the future world order at the end of the Second World War, and the cultural and intellectual breakthroughs that these new narratives created.
Additional text
Inventing The Third World could not be a more timely or trenchant intervention into the engorged ambitions of the accumulative, all embracing, globalization that dominates our current predicament. To portray the “third world” as an alternative or antidote to the bipolar condition of a world divided by the Cold War is to shrink its ambition and downscale its significance. The Third World --- as idea, ideology, aspiration --- was an experiment in transformational living and thinking on a world scale. The very concept itself was a call to create a cosmopolitical political culture of hospitality and equality, that embraced the diversity of the arts, and the regional autonomy of custom and culture. To read Prakash and Edelman’s volume is to encounter an optimism about what might once have been, and what may be yet to come.