From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity by Anne Garland Mahler (review)

The Tricontinental was an alliance of African, Asian, and Latin American countries against imperialism in the Cold War era. In this monograph, Mahler argues that elements of the Tricontinental's ideas and aesthetics are present in a range of historical and contemporary political and social movements. She examines these elements in Cuban revolutionary film, the Nuyorican and Black Power movements, and Black Lives Matter. Focusing on the Global South in geographic and conceptual terms, Garland looks back to the Tricontinental's roots in early twentieth-century artistic and intellectual movements such as negrismo and négritude. According to Garland, Tricontinentalism articulated ideas about power, resistance, and community that reverberated in other Cold War–era movements and whose contemporary echoes shed crucial new light on ongoing social movements. A clear and precise definition of Tricontinentalism, Garland argues, is of vital importance to understanding the current revival of Left political movements in the United States.