Anne Garland Mahler Presentation

This talk traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental — an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental’s critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary social movements such as the World Social Forum and Black Lives Matter, and a Global South political imaginary. The movement’s discourse, which circulated in four languages, also found its way into radical artistic practices, like Cuban revolutionary film and Nuyorican literature. In this talk, Mahler guides us through the Tricontinental’s geography of Cold War radicalism and revolution ¾ from Harlem to Havana, Hanoi, and Cape Town ¾ sharing this movement’s innovative cultural production and reflecting on its relevance today.

Anne Garland Mahler is Assistant Professor of Latin American cultural studies at the University of Virginia. She is author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke, 2018) and director of the online publication Global South Studies. Mahler frequently publishes and speaks in the areas of histories of radical internationalism, racial discourses, cold war politics, and postcolonial and Global South theory.