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

From the Tricontinental to the Global South is ambitiously wide ranging and challenging. Although it does throw welcome new light on the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba is not the main focus, but rather a key part of the context for its real focus: the contemporary Global South, seen as transnational movement and interlocking network of protest and resistance. What Mahler does essentially is read back from that latter notion to the 1966 conference, seen as the expression of a preexisting movement, and then trace the many evolving radical interpretations of imperialism, colonialism, and anticolonialism in subsequent decades to draw conclusions about the "striking resonances" between that early awareness and the recent and contemporary social movements.

The canvas is indeed broad and risky, taking in six decades, several countries and movements, and a range of highly contested theories, but it is a task she carries out with considerable skill and erudition. The risk comes in its breadth and the book's underlying purpose (to enable the awareness of, and within, the "South"), risking a propensity for generalization and wishful assumption, not least that the Global South is indeed an identifiable and coherent network.

Nonetheless, the discussion of the theories leading to the rise of the new interpretation (of a deterritorialized lateral network of race-based, and not class-based, resistance to global network of domination that also transcends nation) is well handled in chapter 1. There it is placed in the context of world-system analyses, postcolonialism, coloniality (with Frantz Fanon's and Richard Wright's contributions being especially well argued), all set against the rise of neoliberalism. In that context, Mahler locates the Tricontinental, tracing its genesis (from Bandung in 1955 and the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization of 1957) but also arguing that the interpretation it espoused reflected an existing tendency in radical anticolonial thought and resistance. Chapter 2 addresses the way the posters and periodical production of both the Tricontinental and Organization for Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (known as OSPAAAL) represented the black struggles inside the United States. This focus includes one of the book's real strengths: textual analysis, in this case a subtle critique of the influential film Now! that then, in chapter 3, leads into a more fully text-based study of the similar positioning adopted by the Young Lords (in their polemical texts) and Nuyorican literary production.

Chapter 4 brings in the Cuban context itself and the contradictions in Cuba's hosting of the conference; Mahler engages in a comprehensive survey of the many external and internal critiques of Cuba's controversial and contested record on racial inequality and racial politics, which includes a fascinating study of the subtleties of the banned film Coffea Arábiga by the marginalized black filmmaker Nicolás Guillén-Landrián. Finally, chapter 5 (the book's key chapter, toward which everything so far has moved) addresses the contemporary global movements that Mahler sees as interlinked within the Global South, tracing each of their major manifestations and identifying what she sees as the resonances between these latest examples of interconnected deterritorialized resistance and the interpretations of the Tricontinentalist "movement," a case that is argued by a focus on their respective textual productions.

How, then, does the whole study work? There are some disappointments. One is the brevity of the conclusion, which reads more like an appeal than a pulling together of complex strands. Another is Mahler's treatment of Cuba. Although the precise nature of the 1960s' revolution is clearly not fundamental to the overall argument, some historical details are either wrong or glossed over; more regrettably, some of the familiar formulaic descriptors tend to be used, not least the continuing assumption of the system's (apparently monolithic and recognizable) "communism," of ideology as always "the state's ideology," and of an alleged closeness to the Soviet Union that was certainly much more nuanced...