Inventing the Third World

"In 2007, Vijay Prashad proposed the notion that the Third World was not a place but rather a project. Inventing the Third World is an important new book that demonstrates how this project, pursued on many fronts as a work in progress, not only was relevant during the turbulent years of the Cold War but, with its notions of development, peace, and social justice, might still be relevant for the world of today. * Hispanic American Historical Review *
This splendid volume does an excellent job of extending the history of the Bandung moment in both directions to frame it in the long twentieth century, and revises its spatial framework to show how Latin America is a crucial part of a picture too often confined to Eurasia, Africa and the Arab world. * Arjun Appadurai, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA *
The concept of the “Third World,” a term frequently used pejoratively in Euro-America, comes to live here in its full potential and promise. This is a story of transnational networks and nodal points, and of the quest to create an alternative, more equitable global order beyond empire. An important intervention and fascinating reading! * Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Global History, Free University of Berlin, Germany *
Bringing together leadings scholars of decolonization and global history, this volume embodies the political and geographic scale of the Third World. Mapping the cross-cutting itineraries of third worldism and traversing its lesser-known tributaries, these essays highlights the Third World’s emancipatory possibilities as well as the geopolitical and ideological differences that fractured solidarities. * Adom Getachew author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination *
Inventing the Third World recovers the inspiring aspirations, neglected actors, and persistent tensions of anticolonial internationalism in its struggle to create liberatory futures. This collection is a magnificent contribution to the global history of our present and a precious resource for imagining how the world could be otherwise. * Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. *
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. * Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and author of The Location of Culture *