Anne Garland Mahler, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, offers an ambitious analysis of transnational, radical political resistance from the mid twentieth century to the present through the lens of the understudied Cuban “Tricontinental.” Mahler conceives of the Tricontinental as much more than the 1966 Havana meeting that railed against US economic and military imperialism and produced the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) or, as simply the official mouthpiece of the Cuban state, which backed the endeavor. To her, it represents a movement that predated the conference and whose global influence spread for years thereafter—indeed to the present—via numerous cultural productions.
Central to her argument is the contention that Tricontinental ideology rested on a critique of the Jim Crow South. Referring to what she calls “metonymic color politics,” Mahler maintains that “the image of the white policeman metonymically stands in for global empire, and conversely, the image of an African American protestor signifies the Tricontinental's global and transracial resistant subjectivity” (4). She argues that Tricontinentalist texts remade color as a category that included all peoples oppressed under capitalism, regardless of phenotype or color. Despite its focus on state violence against African Americans, Tricontinentalist ideology failed to address Cuba's own lack of racial equality, preferring instead to claim victory through Cuba's revolution.
Yet, this book is about more than the cultural productions that Mahler associates with Tricontinentalism; it also “intends to make a unique and vital contribution to the study of the Global South as a critical concept” (7). Mahler begins with a lengthy discussion that traces the genealogies of various academic theories of economic subordination—including world systems theory, postcolonialism, and the Global South (c. 1970s to the present)—alongside an intellectual history of race in Cuba and black internationalist thought (c. late 1800s to mid 1900s). In tracing its historical precedents, she argues that because Tricontinentalism “represented a shift from a Bandung-era solidarity [c. 1955], based around postcolonial nation-states and a former experience of European colonialism, to a more fluid notion of power and resistance, Tricontinentalism largely anticipated a shift currently taking place in related theoretical approaches to transnational politics, such as the shift from postcolonial theory to the Global South” (23). Thus, she asserts that the Global South had its origins in the Cold War political ideologies she examines.
The book examines a tremendous amount of diverse visual and discursive cultural productions from Cuba and the United States, including posters, films, magazines, speeches, and various other writings. While vastly interesting, it is somewhat dizzying to move between sources and movements that include Cuban revolutionary cinematographers, Black Panther and Puerto Rican Young Lord activists, Barack Obama's 2008 “Hope” poster, and contemporary Black Lives Matter and alter-globalization movements. Mahler offers an insightful analysis of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez's 1965 Now, a six-minute short that uses images from the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles to depict police brutality.
For Black Power and Nuyorican activists and artists, she shows how the ideological flow moved in both directions. Their writings and discourses appeared in and affected Cuban-based productions like the Tricontinental Bulletin. And Tricontinentalist text and imagery appear in US literary and activists’ works, especially in New York. This was more convincing than the claims about what she terms “trans-affective solidarity,” a concept she derives largely from a linguistic analysis of Nuyorican writer Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets (1967). Looking for evidence of Tricontinentalism in Thomas's and other Nuyorican writings, she states that “the ideology of Tricontinentalism is both upheld by and produces as surplus value an imagined transnational, transethnic, transracial, and translinguistic affective encounter” (109).
Cultural historians will likely find the deep textual analysis engaging, but others may be less satisfied with Mahler's overreaching claims of cause and effect, such as her assertion regarding Cuba's major role in ending apartheid in South Africa (179). While furthering theoretical considerations is clearly central to her work, some historians may feel uneasy at the focus on theory at the expense of in-depth archival research.
Mahler's work adds to transnational literary and cultural criticism and offers hopeful models for political organization and resistance that criticize both global capitalist exploitation and the role of racial oppression in that process. Despite any limitations found by readers outside the author's own disciplinary boundaries, the study keeps one thinking about these aforementioned connections long after finishing the book.
