Sunday, December 2, 2007

Third World imaginings

For my paper, I want to explore the evolution of the concept “Third World” as a global term with political and economic connotations, a national term arising during the Civil Rights Movement to empower people of color, and Brown’s own localized version of the term embodied in the Third World Center and its programs. I will start with Anderson to show how “Third World” became an imagined community that tied together the global and the local. Using Appadurai’s language of “scapes,” I want to show how they led to the original reproduction of “Third World” from global to national to local, and how their shifting since the Cold War era has led to a disjuncture in the imagining as “Third World” on the global level and “Third World” on the local level have come to mean different things. Using Brown as a specific example, how has its Third World community reimagined (or not reimagined) itself in the absence of a global or even national Third World movement? Can this community postulate its existence on the nostalgia of past movements?

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