Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (alternatively subtitled A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World) charts the political and intellectual origins of a postcolonial, multinational movement in the postwar era. As the author opens his introduction – “The Third World was not a place. It was a project" (xv). Zooming in and out on myriad contexts, the book reads like a collection of loosely-connected microhistories retold through a macrohistorical lens. Prashad hones in on prominent thought leaders, events, and initiatives that he deems crucial to the rise and demise of the so-called Third World project. Through eighteen chapters titled for various epicenters of revolution (e.g., Cairo, Havana, Algiers, and New Delhi), The Darker Nations offers readers a biography – or, rather, biographies – of an overarching concept articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1900 closing address at the first Pan African Convention, “To the Nations of the World” – “There has been assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind … millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere" (23). | "Wifredo Lam, The Jungle (La Jungla), 1943." The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed November 6, 2018. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/34666. |
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