“The Third World was not a place. It was a project” (Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, 2007). This was to be a utopian alliance where the Global South would reconfigure planetary leadership, ending Euro-American dominance. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) attempted to navigate a “third way,” but parallel participation in the petrodollar-driven “Islamic bloc” by some member countries shredded fragile coalitions behind the scenes. Naeem Mohaiemen's three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) explored a “pivot” moment between the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria and the 1974 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Pakistan. The unraveling of old alliances began from a barely discernible Venn diagram overlap between these two groups, one that would take on global significance after the OPEC oil crisis, the Iranian Revolution, and the invasion of Afghanistan. Traveling through the residues of transnational architecture (Niemeyer, Moretti, Le Corbusier) in New York, Algiers, and Dhaka, the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonization, and an always imperfect understanding of socialism. Conversations between Samia Zennadi and Vijay Prashad looked at the contradictions of decolonization movements that revert to reactionary behavior on the “day after” independence. In remembrance of Samia after her tragically early death, Mohaiemen has created a concise visual essay that encapsulates some of her philosophical interventions in the film.
Abstract This article examines how post-1945 historiographic writings from France and Korea figure the anti-national “collaborator.” The transnational figuration and circulation of the collaborator reinforce its unique, constitutive role within networked nationalist formations. This article sketches a dialectics of the collaborator as a phenomenon that accounts for both the othering and the incorporation of this anti-national figure into contemporary nation-foundation narratives. Key theorizations from Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Rousso, Im Chong-guk, and others have transformed collaboration as a postwar problem into the collaborator, a figure-object onto which nationalist anxieties are inscribed across different political affiliations. Tracing eras of remembrance, forgetting, and obsession, this article demonstrates that rhetorical figurations shape collective, cultural perceptions of who collaborators are and what they do for the contemporary nation.
Abstract This article examines the colonial genealogies of anti-immigrant discourse in France through the case of Éric Zemmour, one of France's most influential nativist politicians. It tracks the permutations of nativist discourse in Zemmour's writings, from his little-known 2008 novel Petit frère (Little Brother) to his best-selling essay La France n'a pas dit son dernier mot (France Has Not Had Its Last Word), which propelled his 2022 presidential run. What emerges from this case study is a fascinating glimpse into the colonial production of French nativism, from colonial Algeria to postcolonial France. In conclusion, the article turns to a controversial text that argues for a common recognition of the bifurcated indigeneity of Muslims and Jews of the Maghreb as a first step in claiming political belonging in postcolonial France, against French nativism: Houria Bouteldja's Whites, Jews, and Us (2016).
Abstract This interview with literary critic Anna Kornbluh was conducted on October 18, 2024, in conjunction with her delivery of the 2024–25 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. With her most recent book, Immediacy; or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Kornbluh has established herself as one of the most insightful and important critics of contemporary culture. In this conversation, she reflects on how she came to literary studies, the strangeness of realism, dialectical reading, and the role of style in literary criticism. Kornbluh also discusses political formalism and the value of institutions, the term neoliberalism, social media, the relationship between organizing and literary study, recent projects on climate counteraesthetics and middlebrow aesthetics, and the political realities of late 2024.
Major Ishaque Muhammad (1921–1982), a revolutionary theorist, playwright, and militant activist, was one of the founders of Pakistan's Maoist party, the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party. This essay looks at his various political and literary writings, which have received little scholarly attention, as well as periodicals from political parties that counted him as a member, in order to identify ideas of Marxist and anti-colonial internationalism. It pays particular attention to the aesthetic form of dark citation, a comparative and collective citational practice aimed at linking Third World proletarian struggles against capitalism and colonialism, which animates Muhammad's writings during the 1960s and 1970s.
This essay explores Richard Wright's account of the Bandung Conference, which took place in Indonesia in 1955, in an attempt to come to grips with the effects of Wright's partially privileged mobility on his conception of such issues as underdevelopment, irrationalism, colonialism, and—most importantly—solidarity between oppressed peoples in the Global South and elsewhere. More specifically, it argues that Wright's account of the conference in The Color Curtain (1956) creates its own curtain in both form and content while uncovering the color curtain, particularly in relation to the question of Palestine. From a formal point of view, the essay, following the insights of Kenneth W. Warren, further suggests that Wright produces an aesthetic of difference, an art form congruent with the US agenda in the Cold War era that in turn contributes to curtaining Palestine and Palestinians. It also reflects on the relevance of such an analysis in these critical times, especially because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza in particular and in Palestine at large.
This article examines the influence of Third World internationalist politics in two dramatic texts, al-Miftāḥ by Yūsuf al-ʿĀnī (Iraq, 1968) and L'homme aux sandales de caoutchouc by Kateb Yacine (Algeria, 1970), paying particular attention to the form of the works and their explicit references to anti-imperialist struggles. The article argues that these references are incorporated into the structure of the drama in such a way as to incite in the audience conscious engagement with international liberation struggles, in the interest of producing Third World solidarity. The article also offers a reflection on reading twentieth-century political theater in the shadow of Bertolt Brecht, recognizing both his international influence and other possible ways of understanding literary history that his renown partially obscures.
This article acknowledges the ways in which the so-called national literatures of North Africa's deterritorialized communities sit awkwardly with modern historical narratives: In this case, the presence of Algerians in Russian-language texts (as well as others) from the First Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, during October 1958 serve as a complement to documentation in the archive of an independent nation. A series of text fragments (conceptualized as “postcards”) here connects individuals’ participation in this event with larger stories concerning the emergence of a postcolonial nation.
This essay is a meditation on the notion of Third Cinema and a tribute to the person who singularly theorized it: Teshome H. Gabriel, a professor of film at UCLA, who was a veritable late-Bandung figure as an Ethiopian exile since his radical student days. Gabriel's teaching was formative for a number of students from the postcolonial sphere who came though California universities in the 1980s, and his historical presence traces a unique account of the internationalist spirit of Bandung culture in the post-1989 geopolitical world. Third Cinema is now established as a specific domain in film studies, but in reexamining Gabriel's perspective it becomes a metaphor for a range of political and aesthetic visions across the disciplines that exemplify a contemporary Bandung spirit of collaborative innovation and alternative globality.
The Second Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, which convened in Cairo in 1962 and took place amid a sea change in the Third World, was most significant in securing specifically the literary arm of the Afro-Asian movement. This essay fashions two vignettes that place center stage two writers who participated, Kateb Yacine and Nâzım Hikmet, each representing an issue that mobilized fellow Afro-Asian intellectuals and freedom fighters. In relation to these two dramatis personae, the essay trains attention on interventions in conference halls as much as in impromptu after-hours encounters to elicit imaginaries of shared heritage, tensions between liberation-period positions, and the travel of intertextual tropes of solidarity past these writers’ passage through Cairo. Guarding against attributing the solidarities of the period to a mere top-down manifestation of institutional patronage, the essay extricates from the vignettes features of something in the nature of an Afro-Asian commune of letters.
This review essay looks at Wildan Sena Utama's Vision for the Future: An Intellectual History of the 1955 Bandung Conference both as an archival reconstruction and as a national historiography. Although the book includes some valuable materials from Indonesian sources, it is shaped by a genealogical logic that attempts to stabilize Bandung within a coherent diplomatic tradition. This essay works against that framing, interpreting the conference as an unsettled and open-ended field. It emphasizes the improvisational and contradictory aspects of Bandung and focuses on the print and cultural infrastructures that sustained solidarities beyond the state. Through Foucault, Barthes, and Benjamin, the review positions Bandung not as a telos of diplomatic reasoning but as a proposition alive with disruption and deferral. It contends that any political retrieval of Bandung's political life must remain attuned to the archival gaps, aesthetic fragments, and imaginings that defy genealogical closure.
Samia Zennadi was an editor and publisher in Algiers, Algeria, who played a very important role on the African continent to uphold Pan-African values that were rooted in the Algerian Revolution of 1962. Her death in 2025 is an enormous loss for her country and her continent.
This article demonstrates how the questions that shaped Mahdi ʿAmil's philosophical project were informed by his involvement in the intellectual networks of Third-Worldism, particularly surrounding the journal Révolution africaine. The article introduces the scope of Révolution africaine and zooms in on ʿAmil's engagement with Frantz Fanon on its pages and then traces the resonances of this engagement in ʿAmil's later work. Throughout his life, ʿAmil's work often took the form of direct critiques of articles, books, and conferences; his work is proof of the complexity of his intellectual milieu and serves as a portal to the recurring challenges and debates of revolutionary movements in the Arab world especially after the defeat of 1967. Yet, of what has been written about ʿAmil's work, little is written about his pre-1967 intellectual trajectory. This article illuminates the Third-Worldist foundations of ʿAmil's thought and takes seriously his engagement with the writings of Fanon during the early 1960s, as well as his critical engagements with the authors and themes of Révolution africaine. Foregrounding these early engagements allows us to shed light on ʿAmil's Marxist philosophy of liberation and to enrich our understanding of the traveling theories of liberation that blossomed after Bandung.
As practiced, literary and culture criticism is always in some sense metacritical—that is, finding itself inevitably drawn to discussing its own conditions of possibility. Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction explores these conditions as they have changed since the 1960s, noting in particular the vexed relationship between criticism and politics, itself a much-debated topic within criticism. Robbins surveys the contemporary critical landscape, covering its recent history while also polemically engaging with various critics who wish to “de-politicize” the field. Robbins forcefully argues that criticism and politics are largely inseparable, and with his most recent book, Atrocity: A Literary History, he demonstrates the ways in which such politically engaged criticism operates.
This essay reviews Fredric Jameson's book The Years of Theory, which is the publication of a seminar that Jameson gave at Duke University. The review examines Jameson's attempt to provide a history of theory as an interdisciplinary intellectual movement encompassing philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies in France in the second half of the twentieth century. Of particular importance is the way in which Jameson charts the history of theory against the political conflicts of the twentieth century, from the anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s to the student rebellion of the 1960s. Jameson's claim that theory is something distinct from philosophy is also examined.
Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris (2024) is Andrea Swensson's second historiography of the Minneapolis Sound. Whereas Got to Be Something Here (2017) argues that the Minneapolis Sound is a hybrid of white and black musics, Deeper Blues is a biography of a beloved Minneapolis musician and the father of Jimmy Jam Harris, James “Cornbread” Harris Jr. In her narrative, Swensson foregrounds Cornbread's familial relationships, from birth to his reconciliation with Jimmy. This allows Swensson to tell another story: her relationships with the Harris men and her role in their rapprochement. However, as an account of musical figures, Swensson's narrative is out of tune. Through an analysis of Cornbread's song “Deeper Blues” and black American orality, this review places Cornbread and his music within the blues ethos, its sounds, traditions and sensibilities.
In fall 1978, Michel Foucault proposes political spirituality as a prism for understanding the Iranian uprising's contravention of modernity's secular coordinates, thus continuing the chain of conceptualization begun earlier that year with counter-conduct and the critical attitude. But in extricating the facticity of uprising from revolutionary normative frameworks and narrative schemas, Foucault avowed — however briefly — a lived collective refusal incommensurable with the order of government, the kind of absolute refusal of government that appeared earlier only via negation, equivocation, and disavowal. This essay argues that Foucault thereby prefigured avant la lettre the contemporary paradigm of destituent power, adding to it the subsequently forgotten insight that thinking destituent uprising demands a correlated suspension of the secularizing disjuncture imposed with the age of revolution. From his reflections on Iran, this essay retrieves other uncharacteristic gestures — an antistrategic ethics, a prophetic vision of indefinite experimentation, and a call for world refusal — resulting in a nearly unrecognizable image of Foucault. In uncovering this minor Foucault, a stranger to his dominant portrayals, this essay suggests that a genuine fidelity to such a heterodox thinker may involve inventively attending to the rhetorical hesitations, conceptual ambivalences, and theoretical deviations of his discourse at least as much as systematizing his explicit utterances, an approach it finds characteristic of Daniele Lorenzini's The Force of Truth.
This interview with literary critic Robert T. Tally Jr. was conducted on April 26, 2024, in conjunction with his delivery of the 2023 – 24 Babcock Lecture at Hartwick College. Tally is one of the premier critics presently working in the field of spatial literary studies and has published over a dozen books and over one hundred articles and book chapters on US and world literature, critical theory, and the history of criticism. Reflecting broadly on the trajectory of his career, Tally discusses the gratitude that has accompanied his scholarly writing, his interests in spatial literary studies, his relationship with the teaching and work of Jonathan Arac, Paul A. Bové, and Fredric Jameson, and the role of theory at the present time.
