THE THIRD WORLD
“Third World” refers to the colonized, neo-colonised, or decolonized
nations and “minorities” that experienced structural disadvantages
(disadvantages they face as a result of how society functions; how
resources are distributed, how people relate to each other, who have
power, how institutions are organised), has been shaped by the colonial
powers.
Third World nations are clustered in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the
Pacific Rim. These countries shared various features, including common
history as had been subjected to European and North American
domination, and were under subjugation. The term ‘Third World’ refers
to one-third of the world that was not aligned with the Cold War
superpowers i.e., the United States and the Soviet Union.
The term "First World" refers to the developed, capitalist, industrial
countries, a bloc of countries aligned with the United States after World
War II: North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. "Second
World" refers to the former communist-socialist, industrial states, the
Eastern bloc; the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends.
Third World, not a homogenous group, has different political systems
and levels of economic development. Third World countries are also
called developing countries because they are facing economic, social and
political problems like poverty, starvation, illiteracy and ethnic conflicts.
The term Third World was Coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy
in the 1950s and emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference, which
consisted of “non-aligned” 29 countries of African and Asian nations
respectively, held in Indonesia.
The definition encompasses other categories that were from time
immemorial entitled to the third world; such as crude economic
categories ("the poor"), developmental categories (the "non-
industrialized"), racial categories ("the non-White"), cultural categories
("the backward"), or geographical categories ("the East," "the South").
These other categorizations are imprecise because the Third World is
not necessarily poor in resources (Venezuela and Iraq are rich in oil), nor
simply non-White (Argentina and Ireland are predominantly White), nor
non-industrialized (Brazil, Argentina, and India are all highly
industrialized), nor culturally "backwards" even in "high art" terms.
The term "Third World" is almost outdated; that is today the term is
replaced by underdeveloped or better-developing countries. The less-
developed or least-developed regions (the United Nations designation)
stand in contrast to "more-developed regions" which comprise North
America, Japan, Europe and Australia-New Zealand. Less-developed
regions comprise almost all regions of Africa, Latin America and the
Caribbean, Asia, and the Pacific Islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and
Polynesia. "Least developed countries" for example are Afghanistan,
Chad, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zambia.
For Shiva Naipaul, the term “Third World” is symptomatic of a "bloodless
universality that robs individuals and their societies of their
particularity.” Under the term, their uniqueness, identity, and different
factors that put them, in particular, are being erased and they resort to
impassive(bloodless) anti-colonialist struggles.
Echoing Naipaul, but from a Marxist perspective, Aijaz Ahmad argues
that Third World theory is an "open-ended ideological interpellation"; a
process in which we encounter our culture's values and ideologies and
internalise them, which is open-ended. Thus, hiding the unpleasant
situation of class oppression While limiting socialism to make the people
believe it to be non-existent.
Third World feminist writers such as Nawal El Saadawi, Assia Djebar,
Gayatri Spivak, and Lelia Gonzales have shown the gendered limitations
of Third World nationalism. For instance, countries such as Iran and
Turkey fit uneasily into the tripartite scheme, (3 parties together
colonised them) in that they were never directly colonized, even though
they form part of the economically "peripheral" countries; away from
the centre, were subjected to indirect European domination.
Three-worlds theory not only flattens heterogeneities of diverse
individuals, masks contradictions or the combinations of ideas and elides
differences, but also hides similarities, making it difficult to comprehend.
(For example, the common presence of "Fourth World" indigenous
peoples in both "Third World" and "First World" countries).
Third World nationalist discourse often assumes an unquestioned
national identity, but most contemporary nation-states are "mixed"
formations. A country like Brazil, arguably Third World in racial and
economic terms is still dominated by a Europeanized elite. The US, a
"First World" country which always had its Native American and African-
American minorities, is now becoming even more "Third Worldized" by
waves of post-independence migrations. The First World/Third World
struggle takes place not only between nations but also within them.
The countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa do have in common an
"exclusion from decision-making power and an oppressive experience of
global development and industrialization, leading to economies obliged
to be complementary to those of the advanced capitalist countries."
These third-world countries were devoid of privileges and authority.
According to UN statistics, although the First World comprises only one-
fifth of the world's population, it enjoys 60 per cent of global wealth
drawn in substantial measure from the Third World. Despite the third-
world population being of a larger measure, they are neglected of
benefiting from their own resources as it is continuously being targeted
and looted by first-world countries, making those countries prosper.
In geopolitical and economic terms, the term "Third World" has certain
advantages over alternative expressions. While the polarity "North-
South" usefully describes the world as divided into rich and poor,
whereby the industrial market economies (First World) and the formerly
non-market economies (Second World) form the major consumers of
the raw materials produced by a Third World largely located in the
southern hemisphere, it is also misleading, not only because some
wealthy countries (such as Australia) are located in the South, but also
because of the current "Third Worldization" of a Second World
increasingly dependent on the West.
Finally, the idea of the "proletarian" versus the "bourgeois" (working
class vs capitalist) nations conceals the patriarchal and classed nature of
all three worlds. These terms, like that of the "Third World," are only
schematically useful; they must be placed "under erasure,” seen as
provisional and only partly illuminating. Therefore, we will retain the
expression "Third World," to signal both the dumb inertia of neo-
colonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with
the warning that the term covers up fundamental issues of race, class,
gender, and culture. At the same time, we would call for a more flexible
conceptual framework to accommodate different and even
contradictory dynamics in diverse world zones.
THIRD WORLD CINEMA
Third World Cinema, also called Third World Cinema- an aesthetic and
political cinematic movement in Third World countries, mainly in Latin
America, Africa and Asia.
The movement originated in Latin America between the 1960s to 1970s.
These areas have had historical encounters with colonial and imperial
forces, which shaped their economic and political power structures.
The notion of "Third Cinema" emerged from the Cuban revolution, from
Peronism and Perón's "third way" in Argentina, and from such film
movements as Cinema Novo in Brazil.
The term was coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino, the producers of La hora de Los Hornos (1968; The Hour
of the Furnaces), one of the best-known Third Cinema documentary
films of the 1960s.
They defined Third Cinema as "the cinema that recognizes in [the anti-
imperialist struggle in the Third World and its equivalents within the
imperialist countries] ... the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic
manifestation of our time... in a word, the decolonization of culture."
They told that “Third World Cinema is born out of concrete historical
conditions in the third world; it cannot be understood without a
knowledge of these conditions.”
Just as peoples of colour form the global majority, so the cinemas of
people of colour form the majority cinema, and it is only the notion of
Hollywood as the only "real" cinema that conceals this fact.
‘First World Cinema’- the Hollywood production model that idealises
bourgeois values to a passive audience through escapist spectacle and
individual characters.
‘Second World Cinema’- the European art film, which rejects Hollywood
conventions, but is centred on the individual expression of the auteur
directors.
On contradictory to first and second-world cinemas, third-world cinemas
aimed to revolutionise the film industry by moving away from the typical
formula of the mainstream, capitalistic motifs of Hollywood filmmaking
and giving justice to what the mainstream media does not show. They
suffered from being independent, exhibited and funded.
Characteristics of Third-World Cinema:
Non-commercialised, challenging Hollywood’s model.
Questions structures of power, particularly colonialism and its
legacies.
Rejects the view of cinema as a vehicle for personal expression,
seeing the director instead as a part of a collective.
Appeals to the masses by presenting the truth and inspiring
revolutionary activism.
Aims for the liberation of the oppressed, whether this
oppression is based on gender, class, race, religion or ethnicity.
Rejects the rules of first and second-world cinema and strives to
transform its audience
Produced with the intention of provoking discussion amongst its
viewers.
In purely classificatory terms, we might envision overlapping circles of
denotation:
1. A core circle of "Third Worldist" films produced by and for Third
World peoples (no matter where those people happen to be) and
adhering to the principles of "Third Cinema".
2. A wider circle of the cinematic productions of Third World
peoples (retroactively defined as such), whether or not the films
adhere to the principles of Third Cinema and irrespective of the
period of their making.
3. Another circle consists of films made by First or Second World
people in support of Third World peoples and adhering to the
principles of Third Cinema.
4. A final circle, somewhat anomalous in status, at once “inside”
and “outside,” comprising recent diasporic hybrid films, (for
example, those of Mona Hatoum or Hanif Kureishi, which both
build on and interrogate the conventions of "Third Cinema.")
By far the largest category would be the second: the cinematic
productions of countries now designated as "Third World." This group
would include the major traditional film industries of countries like India,
Egypt, Mexico, Argentina, and China, as well as the more recent post-
independence or post-revolution industries of countries such as Cuba,
Algeria, Senegal, Indonesia, and scores of others.
What we now call "Third World cinema" did not begin in the 1960s, as is
often assumed. Even before the beginning of the twentieth century,
cinema was a worldwide phenomenon, at least in terms of consumption.
The Lumière cinématographe, for example, went not only to London and
New York but also to Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Shanghai. In the
1920s, India was producing more films than Great Britain. Countries like
the Philippines were producing over fifty films a year by the 1930s, Hong
Kong was making more than 200 films annually by the 1950s, and Turkey
almost 300 films a year in the early 1970s
One interesting feature of early Third World production is the presence
of women directors and producers: (Aziza Amir and Assia Daghir in
Egypt; Carmen Santos and Gilda de Abreu in Brazil; Emilia Saleny in
Argentina; and Adela Sequeyro, Matilda Landeta, Candida Beltran
Rondon, and Eva Liminano in Mexico.)
"Third World cinema,” taken in a broad sense, far from being a marginal
extension to First World cinema, actually produces most of the world's
feature films. If one excludes made-for-TV films, India is the leading
producer of fiction films in the world, releasing between 700 and 1,000
feature films a year. Asian countries, taken together, make up over half
of the annual world total. Burma, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, the
Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh each produce over fifty feature
films a year.
Among the salient trends of recent years have been: a notable increase
in Asian film production; the emergence of audio-visual media giants in
Mexico and Brazil (Brazil's Rede Globo is now the fourth largest network
in the world); the rise (and occasionally the decline) of centralized, state-
sponsored film production in both socialist and capitalist countries
(Cuba, Algeria, Mexico, Brazil); and the appearance of First World
nations and institutions (notably in Britain, Japan, Canada, France,
Holland, Italy, and Germany) as funding sources for Third World
filmmakers.
In film studies, one name for Eurocentrism is Hollywood centrism .
"Because of the worldwide imitation of Hollywood's successful mode of
production," we are told in a standard text on classical cinema,
"oppositional practices have generally not been launched on an
industry-wide basis. No absolute, pure alternative to Hollywood exists."
Since all industries imitate Hollywood, no alternative exists embeds a
sequencing which makes Hollywood the primum mobile of film history,
when in fact capitalist-based film production appeared roughly
simultaneously in many countries, including in what is now called "Third
World" countries. This trend threatens the growth of regional cinemas.
The Hollywood-centric formulation would reduce India's giant film
industry, which produces more films than Hollywood and whose hybrid
aesthetics mingle Hollywood continuity codes and production values
with the anti-illusionist values of Hindu mythology, to a mere "mimicry"
of Hollywood.
Despite its hegemonic position, then, Hollywood still contributes only a
fraction of the annual worldwide production of feature films. Although
arguably the majority of cinema, Third World cinema is rarely featured in
cinemas, video stores, or even in academic film courses, and when it is
taught it is usually ghettoized. We would propose, therefore, the
multiculturalization of the film studies curriculum.
Despite the imbrication of "First" and "Third" Worlds, the global
distribution of power still tends to make the First World countries
cultural "transmitters" and to reduce most Third World countries to the
status of "receivers." In this sense, the cinema inherits the structures
laid down by the communication infrastructure of the empire, the
networks of telegraph and telephone lines and information apparatuses
enabling the imperialist countries to monitor global communications and
shape the image of world events.
In the cinema, this hegemonizing process intensified shortly after World
War I, when US film distribution companies and secondarily European
companies began to dominate Third World markets and were further
accelerated after WW II, with the growth of transnational media
corporations. The continuing economic dependency on Third World
cinemas makes them vulnerable to neo-colonial pressures.
When dependent countries try to strengthen their own film industries by
setting up trade barriers to foreign films, for example, First World
countries can threaten retaliation in some other economic areas such as
the pricing or purchase of raw materials. Hollywood films, furthermore,
often cover their costs in the domestic market, and can therefore be
profitably "dumped" on Third World markets at very low prices.
While the Third World is overwhelmed with North American films, TV
series, popular music, and news programs, the First World receives
precious little of the vast cultural production of the Third World, and
what it does receive is usually mediated by transnational corporations.
One telling index of this global Americanization is that even Third World
airlines program Hollywood comedies as its idea of universal fare. The
problem lies not in the exchange but in the unequal terms on which the
exchange takes place.
At the same time, the media imperialism thesis needs drastic retooling in
the contemporary era. First, it is simplistic to imagine an active First
World forcing its products on a passive Third World. Second, global mass
culture does not so much replace local culture as coexist with it,
providing a cultural lingua franca with a "local" accent. Third, there are
powerful reverse currents as a number of Third World countries
(Mexico, Brazil, India, Egypt) dominate their own markets and even
become cultural exporters. The Indian TV version of the Mahabharata
won a 90 per cent domestic viewer share during a three-year run,58 and
Brazil's Rede Globo now exports its telenovelas to more than eighty
countries around the world.
We must distinguish, furthermore, between the ownership and control
of the media - an issue of political economy - and the specific cultural
issue of the implications of this domination for the people on the
receiving end.
