There is plenty of good research on how terms like the “Third World” are Eurocentric and racist, and how they produce inferiority. Many scholars have written about the various forms of suffering, discrimination, hegemony, and subordination that these terms reflect and generate. Instead, the authors of Inventing the Third World reconstruct the emancipatory value of the concept “Third World,” which is assumed to be derogatory and dead. This book demonstrates that terms like the “Third World” can be and are often used in ways to emancipate the discriminated populations they refer to (pp. 17–18). More revisionist histories like these are necessary. As Agustín Cosovschi in chapter three writes:

The story that Cosovschi and the other contributors can then tell is one of building “networks of solidarity” based on various ideas, discourses, and values that “responded to the overlapping necessities of the diverse actors involved, however unequal or asymmetric” (p. 67).

The very origins of the term Third World are also questioned and rewritten. In chapter one, Cindy Ewing debunks the myth that the term was created outside the Third World, notably in France. It is a myth, writes Ewing, that Alfred Sauvy first used the term in a speech in 1952. Ewing applauds studies that instead look beyond the intellectual and radical anti-imperial circles in Paris and London to find other origins of the term. An earlier appearance of the term comes from within the Third World at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March and April of 1947, hosted by the Indian Council of World Affairs. And this earlier use of the term emphasized how the Third World should restore the global balance of power in the late 1940s, which was too dependent on the opposed worlds of America and Russia.Footnote ¹ The common origin story from Sauvy’s 1952 speech offers a different definition of and goal for the Third World—Sauvy argued for engaged yet neutral diplomacy for post-colonial states (pp. 31–32).

I especially welcome their focus on shifts and contested meanings of the Third World. For a concept that is supposed to unite a region and various populations, the Third World is often portrayed as something uniform, something that means the same to everybody. The book shows well how this is not always the case. Jawaharlal Nehru’s project to build Asian unity emphasized principles of statehood and prescribed non-interventionist strategies of diplomacy in the region. Nehru, along with other colleagues, wanted diplomats from the various Asian countries to meet regularly, and proposed a military arrangement. The other countries were less enthused and many of them felt an undercurrent of the possibility for India to expand their territory (pp. 35–36). There were also frictions in the Arab-Asian group that emerged in the 1940s regarding questions to do with the status of Indonesia, the former Indian colonies in Africa, and the United Nations response to the Korean War (pp. 37–38).

There were disputes over different definitions of democracy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Cuban revolution caused a rift between Cuba and Mexico. On 1 May 1960, Fidel Castro spoke to assembled crowds in Cuba about how democracy was when the majority governs in the interest of the majority. The Mexicans could not agree with this sort of definition of democracy, because “the interests of the people had been abandoned” (p. 51). Another example of tension concerned the relations with the United States. Within the World Peace Council, there were tensions between the Soviets and Chinese. Nikita Khrushchev’s attempts to sign agreements with the United States to decrease tensions were seen by the Chinese as “collaboration with U.S. imperialism” and “a violation of the principles of national liberation” (p. 57). Other examples include: between the leaders of the Cuban revolution and a Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 112); and the turn away by the Indian Centre for the Study of Developing Societies from formal and normative methods dominant in the political and social sciences in India in the 1960s (pp. 250–254).

Another strength of this work is the breadth of geographical regions. The analyses span great distances in the Global South: Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. But perhaps the unique feature of the work is the use of many different types of sources. The list is long: novels (pp. 16, 103, 117), meetings (pp. 20, 40), artists (pp. 20, 104), a map (p. 33), a diary (p. 48), a prize (p. 49), a scholarship (pp. 76–77, 121), letters (pp. 49, 103), travels (pp. 77–78), poems (pp. 52, 101), film (p. 113), theater (p. 143), documentary (p. 150), a speech (p. 118), songs (pp. 140, 144), and newspapers (p. 12). Moreover, the intellectual contextualization is excellent. All the authors trace the reception of the various works and sources they analyze (see especially pp. 103, 105, 109, 112, 115, 118, 124, 125, 140, and 144, and ch. 10).

Some of the contributors also use innovative methods. For instance, in chapter seven, Penny M. Von Eschen uses what she calls “a jazz methodology of reading,” paying “especial attention to the breaks and discontinuities, ‘slipping into the breaks and looking around’” (p. 139). Von Eschen offers one of the accounts of disagreement among individuals fighting for the Third World. Her main protagonist, Katherine Dunham, an African anthropologist, choreographer, and dancer, declares at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966 that there was a need to return dance to where it first came from, “which is the heart and soul of man, and man’s social living” (p. 148). The other participants objected to what they heard as a defense of tradition over change and modernity. Dunham was thereafter plunged into conflict with friends and colleagues.

Another innovative approach comes from Atreyee Gupta, who proposes a “conjunctural history that mobilizes the color black as a lens to unpack the intricate intersections between liberatory politics and artistic expression” in the mid-twentieth century (p. 158). Focusing on black is pertinent because most theories of modern Western art in the 1950s considered “black to be a noncolor and, therefore, relevant only as a shadow, an obverse of true colors, or better still negation of color” (p. 161). Black was thus neither included in color spectrums in academic treatises nor in use as an independent color in the school education in Europe or its colonies. Gupta focuses on Francis Newton Souza’s exhibition Black Art and Other Paintings at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1966. In such a way, Gupta can map and analyze how Souza used the “fugitive” (p. 158) color black as a form of resistance (p. 174).

Jessica Bachman in chapter ten follows Soviet texts on paper to post-colonial India. She consults private archives, uncovering letters from Indians to various Soviet presses asking for originals of photos from their books. Bachman shows how “Indian consumers adopted, transformed, and repurposed Soviet visual materials to constitute themselves as modern leftist, internationalist, and cosmopolitan subjects in ways that could not have been anticipated or, on occasions, even desired by Soviet authorities” (p. 196). She builds on existing scholarship that does “bottom up visual history” of Indian modernity to situate the circulation and consumption of Soviet images (p. 196). She talks of one letter writer and his frustration with two-sided printing, which meant that if you should want to cut out a photo to frame it, you would “inevitably destroy an equally good photograph printed on the opposite side” (p. 203). Gupta’s interpretation of such a comment is pertinent: “for the images to realize their full world-making potential for him, they would need to be set free from the confines of the book and incorporated into the everyday space of his home” (p. 204). When scholars take a different perspective, expand the variety of sources, and use novel methods, you are bound to find other stories, realities, and explanations. This book offers several excellent examples.

Reinventing the Third World is a well-written, easy-to-read collected work with short and concise chapters. I would only encourage the contributors to have included more material context. There is one exception in chapter seven where some political and socio-economic context is given, but otherwise the book concentrates on its sources and the production and diffusions of those sources. Writing a book always comes with trade-offs, and, as said, I enjoyed the short and concise chapters, so perhaps this was the choice the contributors made to concentrate on the discourse and leave the economic history to the economic historians. It is up to every reader to decide whether this choice is justified.

The conclusion also goes one step further, which reinforces the need for such revisionist and emancipating histories. The conclusion gives insights on recent European history and why it differs from the Third World or what we call the Global South today. The book explains why the Global South has nationalized, while the European nations were able to federalize through the European project in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 263–264). In sum, by shifting the focus of the term “Third World,” the authors have been able, “beyond the gifts it gives in understanding the historical record—to help those who want to plot a next move in the present. For whatever else is true of the end of empire, it left dreams of global fairness that refuse to die” (p. 265).