ABSTRACT
The failures of development are self-evident everywhere you look. Global justice remains elusive and basic needs such as water and health care are increasingly privatized out of the reach of far too many people. Across the planet, warfare is ascendant, corruption rules, and poverty expands. Clearly the time is long past to examine the idea of Third World development and its relationship to European imperialism. New paradigms are urgently called for, formations of thinking that can mine the truth of how various peoples across the global south (and in the pockets of the global south found in the industrialized north) actually live. In this chapter, I propose that Third World Cultural Studies (TWCS) contains the possibility to break from modernization theory’s colonial past (and present) due to its sensitivities to the historic and lived experiences of subject populations and to the varieties of colonial violence. An engaged TWCS, moreover, seeks to historicize our contemporary condition and to recover lost and hidden histories that remain obscured by the dominant representations of our era. A historical sensibility is essential to the success of TWCS. Amnesia is characteristic of power, which forever seeks to forget all that is inconvenient for its execution, but there can be no justice without memory. To that end, I explore in this chapter the concept of TWCS by turning to one incident, a forgotten moment more than forty years ago when colonial violence invaded the city of Paris.
