ABSTRACT
Recently, with the much talked about rise of China and India, and their imminent location in the pantheon of super-powers, I have increasingly found that conversations between Indian origin “native informants” such as myself and my Chinese counterparts often turn to speculation and contestation on issues such as: “Is globalization good for the cities of India and China?”, “Is there a genuine local architecture and urbanism emerging in Asia?”, “Must sustainability and energy effi ciency be the new mantras of development?”, “Who is doing better – China or India?” and, of course, “What can our role be as US-based architectacademics in infl uencing and participating in this new development?”1 In one such conversation, when I was bemoaning the need for us to break free of the persistent circuit of debates of the “global versus the local,” the “universal versus the regional” type, a Chinese colleague suggested that what he was interested in was thinking about architecture of the “New Third World.”2 While our conversation did not advance into specifi cs, I was intrigued by his renewal of the term “Third World” with the prefi x “New” – a move to re-don that tattered old title, that generally signals economic deprivation, as the title for asserting new found power under globalization. As the act of recasting a former slur as a badge of honor, the idea of a “New Third World” could be understood as a genuinely postcolonial act, if being postcolonial is described as the work of inverting and reinscribing colonial ideologies in the service of the postcolonies rather than the metropolitan centers. The backwardness of the colonized world was described by colonial ideology as a consequence of the inherent civilizational backwardness,
rather than the specifi c cause of two-plus centuries of colonial deprivation that had resulted in the creation of the poverty of the postcolonial Third World. Re-wearing the badge of poverty with the “New” prefi x, thus, insists on seeing the postcolonial world’s new accession to power on the world stage as a revising of history, rather than a completion of the colonial project by discarding that supposed backwardness and “opening up” to Western style capitalism/ civilization.
