A political imagination designated by French historian Alfred Sauvy in reference to the “third estate” in French history, the Third World has been in existence for more than six decades. It rose as the nonalignment movement and shone on the Bandung Conference of 1955 as a spirit of autonomy and liberation, but quickly faltered in the 1970s and recoded by political economists of the West to signify underdevelopment. While remaining a spirit of solidarity and autonomy, it was further pushed away by the forces of capitalist globalization after 1989, making each Third World country striving to rid itself of the Third World label. The rise of China, however, challenged the myth of Third World underdevelopment and created a new momentum—through the Belt and Road initiatives—for thinking about the Third World today. 

This international workshop seeks to address this critical moment of China’s rise by asking how and what it means to think about the Third World today. Despite the geopolitical thinking of Third World alliance and the capitalist logic of Third World market, our emphasis falls on the question of temporality and media with which we think about the Third World: i.e, how and when did the Third World as an idea emerged on our intellectual and sensorial horizons, and with what visual and textual representations did the Third World come to our mind? We believe that art, literature, and the media play a huge role in constructing the meanings and images of the Third World in our minds, and it is time for us to take stock of and reflect on them through the histories of their appearance. It is our hope that the perspective of translation as a transcultural, transmedial exercise can better equip us with a set of critical tool to unpack and remake the Third World in this changing times, not only to deepen our understanding of the self and the world, but also to unveil the artistic, literary, and social apparati that have formed and shaped our political unconscious.

This international workshop is sponsored by the Institute in Asian, African, and Latin American Culture and Art at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, a new intellectual platform founded in December 2016 with the aims of facilitating and advancing tri-continental comparison and relations through the lenses of art and thoughts. Through this workshop, we hope to establish the presence of our new Institute and to bring together young scholars, artists, and activists working in the fields of Third World studies, and to generate a set of problematics—through the lens of art, translation, and media—to challenge the geopoltiics of knowledge that has made the Third World and its multiple configurations at once an aborted project and a utopian promise for China and the world today. How to revive the project and fulfill the promise is our mission today.