The Tricontinental magazine and the making of the Third World: concept, itineraries and sensibilities

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, the Third World emerged as an important political category, orienting ways to be and position oneself in relation to the world, as attested by the Havana Tricontinental Conference held in 1966 in Havana. This work studies a publication founded by the meeting, the Tricontinental magazine, with the goal of comprehending its efforts to weave the political and discursive ties that were to unite this collectivity. To build the Third World, the magazine mobilized theoretical debates and narrative figurations, and also engendered transnational solidarity networks. Throughout the pages of the Tricontinental, the Third World concept gained multifaceted contours and was linked to theoretical frameworks such as the Dependency Theory and the appropriations of Marxism by national liberation movements. Shared figurations – such as the oxymorons in relating colonial antagonisms or the heroic tone of narrating armed struggle – demonstrate the symbolic elaborations and sensible dimensions of this enterprise. Backstage, the process of editing the Tricontinental magazine allows one to attest the organization’s role in engendering itineraries and transnational networks that connected intellectuals and militants from across the globe. The Third World was, therefore, intimately related to the Tricontinental, not only in the way it mobilized its establishment, but also because it would come to be itself built by this editorial project.