This essay asks why the Third World has become a symbol of poverty and failed infrastructure while the political imperative towards decolonization has gained popularity. By examining histories of decolonization in mid-twentieth century and the subsequent establishment of postcolonial nation-states that often ignored, suppressed, or actively participated in settler colonial occupations both globally and internally, I argue that there needs to be a widespread reckoning with what constitutes anti-colonial liberation.
Keyword: anti-colonial
Reawakening Ali Sardar Jafri’s Asia Jaag Utha
The epic poem Asia Jaag Utha, written in 1950 by Ali Sardar Jafri of the Indian Progressive Writers Association, was a battle hymn of its time, a celebration of Asia’s history and geography, with a vision for Asian liberation and communist revolution at the dawn of the Cold War in the aspirational Third World. Are its messages still applicable today, or is it strictly a period piece? This essay analyzes what Jafri was trying to do in his own context and explores whether it has anything to say to ours. In order to do this, the author enters into dialogue with Jafri’s poetry, and proposes some updates to its political agenda that might be needed to carry its energy into the present. While the mid-twentieth century vehicles of progress and liberation (such as industrial development and the postcolonial nation-state) require critique, Jafri’s emancipatory impulses and ideals of solidarity ring true.
Anti-Colonial Defeat: The 1967 Naksa and Its Consequences
This entry asks what it means to mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for revolutionary liberation. State power was indeed authoritarian, and global solidarity in the era of the Third World Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was superfluous, but it still meant something to people then and now. Losing it was felt. In this piece, I revisit the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel known as al-Naksa (the resounding setback) within the context of the Third World movement and its influence on global solidarity in the ensuing decades following 1967. I focus on the loss of Egypt’s position as an anti-colonial leader after the 1967 war and subsequent death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Egypt, once a bastion of revolutionary anti-colonial fervor at the nexus of Pan-Arab and Pan-African imaginaries, and a hub of the historic Third World, became radically realigned with the Global North under Anwar Sadat. I argue that the fate of the Egyptians, Palestinians, Arabs, and of anti-colonial global struggle each became unlinked and siloed as individual struggles. It is not just Arabs or Egyptians or Palestinians who were defeated, it was a whole anti-colonial ethos. How do we mourn the loss of the state as a vehicle for liberation, for Palestinians, for Arabs, for Africans, and for the post-colony?