Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad has a new book out.

Can you tell ZNet, please, what The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World is about? What is it trying to communicate?

All of us are familiar with the liberal anxiety about naming.....what to call you, Asian, Asian American, Black, African American, Latino, Hispanic, what not. As if the naming itself is the issue.....that if you come up with the perfect name, the problems and projects associated with the name dissolve. The same with the Third World. You will recall that in the 1980s this problem emerged for well-meaning people in the Atlantic world: is it the Third World, Less Developed Countries, Underdeveloped Countries....what to call it! The term “third world” seemed to evoke famine, failed state, fratricide......failure.

All this is bunk. It was symptomatic of something larger. The defeat of the Third World project.

My book is about that project, which has its beginnings in the anti-colonial struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries. These struggles created movements, which were represented by organizations who made a bid for power. In the struggle they crafted an anti-colonial nationalism which was, interestingly, internationalist. I re-create the project of the Third World from the Bandung meeting of 1955 to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and onward. I revisit the platform created by the Third World, a project that was nothing short of the re-creation of the world.

Of course I seek out the limitations of the model, the authoritarian states that emerged, the border projects that led to large military spending and whatnot. But I also show how the Third World project was assassinated by international finance and by military interventions of one kind or another. The Third World project, I show, ended in the 1980s, just when that anxiety about naming emerges.

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