The (New) Global South in the Age of Global Capitalism: A Return to the Tricontinental

• In Event: The Tricontinental Legacy: A Retrospective on Global Revolution

Abstract

A transnational political imaginary is emerging from diverse people’s negative experiences with globalization. This imaginary creates immense potential for solidarity among grassroots political movements and is known in contemporary scholarship as the “Global South.” This paper argues that the Global South-as a theory and political phenomenon-represents a revival of key elements of the understudied global Cold War movement based in Havana, Cuba called the Tricontinental.
Using the World Social Forum (the anti-globalization movement begun in Brazil in 2001 that is predominantly made up of participants from Latin America and the United States) as a case study, I examine the revival of tricontinentalism in activism in the Americas both in aesthetics and ideology. Aesthetically, activists draw from tricontinentalist cultural production in the proliferation of the “political remix video,” the creation of political posters reminiscent of Tricontinental screenprints, and in the use of “culture jamming” to subvert media culture. Ideologically, contemporary concepts like the Global South similarly rely on a deterritorialized and networked concept of power and an equally global vision of resistance.
However, this revival of tricontinentalism has been stripped of one its core foundational elements: what I call its metonymic color politics. The Tricontinental’s metonymic color politics allowed for an inclusionary and non-racially deterministic resistant subjectivity but still kept racism and the image of global capitalism as a racializing apparatus in the spotlight. In contrast, the transnational solidarity of political resistance today tends to reproduce the colorblind multiculturalism of neoliberal discourse, producing silences around racial inequalities.

Author

• Anne Garland Mahler, University of Arizona