Call for Papers

Seminar on “Tricontinental Magazine and the Third World Left in the Era of Decolonization” for the 2026 meeting of ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) at Montreal, Canada, from February 26 to March 1.

Print culture in the era of decolonization has been seen as instrumental in creating the voice of a Third World Left. This seminar proposes an in-depth focus on Tricontinental, a bi-monthly magazine first published in 1967 out of revolutionary Havana, and produced in four languages (Spanish, English, French, and Italian). Tricontinental was the print product of Cuba’s tricontinental strategy, which was designed as a “third way” for international socialism beyond the Soviet and Chinese blocs. The Tricontinental was the first organization to attempt a global revolutionary alliance against imperialism since the early days of the Comintern (Young 2018), though unlike the Comintern, it was not directed by European communists. It merged two separate spheres of subaltern struggle–Asia and Africa on the one hand, and Latin America on the other (Mahler 2018).Tricontinental was the official “media outlet” of OSPAAAL, the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, created in 1966 in Havana at the First Tricontinental Conference. It had originated from an earlier organization, the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), created at the 1955 Bandung Conference, and marked the extension of AAPSO into the Americas. Outside of Cuba, the journal was supported by figures such as Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the millionaire publisher who became close to Fidel Castro and whose sympathy for liberation struggles led him to produce an Italian edition.

Tricontinental played a major role in articulating Third-Worldist thought as an internationalist project and as distinctly non-aligned in the context of Cold War polarities. Itsreaders witnessed the formation of a vast tricontinental canon coming out of the journal, which assembled the writings of all the major anticolonial thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Carlos Marighella, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Ahmed Sékou Touré, and Ernesto Che Guevara, as well as African American thinkers and activists such as Stokely Carmichael and LeRoi Jones. The disparate intellectual influences and ideas that converged in the journal would later form the basis of contemporary postcolonial theory (Young 2018). 

Papers are invited on all aspects of the journal, including production, editing, circulation, readership, intellectual content, and more. Possible topics could cover, but are not limited to:

• Tricontinental and the Cuban revolution
• The dissemination and influence of the journal beyond Cuba
• Editions of the journal in four languages and the role of multi-lingualism in the development of anticolonial revolutionary thought
• Tricontinental and visual culture (the famous photo of Ernesto Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda and first published in the journal helped to establish the popular iconography of Che as a global symbol of revolution)
• Tricontinental and postcolonial theory
• Contemporary legacies of Tricontinental and Tricontinentalism

The portal will accept paper submissions until October 2. You can submit the paper abstract here: https://www.acla.org/seminar/94200a39-2b04-4734-a5d8-a0674f6ec180. We will be informed of the outcome of whether the seminar panel has been accepted by December 1, 2025.