Introduction – Towards Third Worlding

Abstract

In a well-known formulation, Vijay Prashad wrote that, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.” This forum feels out ways to understand and remember the Third World project as a collective horizon of freedom enacted by ordinary people in their daily lives. Beyond the political leadership of the iconic leadership of Third World state leaders and the foundational conferences they convened, we seek to explore how the Third World was lived and imagined. We do so as an invitation to fellow teachers and students to deepen collective imagining through a twin process of learning and unlearning. Formulated as a practice of Third Worlding, this invitation is a proposal to make historical precedents familiar and make progressive visions of intersectional, anti-racist, decolonial struggle strange. It seeks out other ways of calling comrades into political practices by exploring the ways in which Third World subjects imagined and related to each other. In this introduction, we lay out what Third Worlding might offer as a tool for reorientation in the political present.