“Everyone Works Their Own Way” (Revisiting Samia Zennadi)

Abstract “The Third World was not a place. It was a project” (Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, 2007). This was to be a utopian alliance where the Global South would reconfigure planetary leadership, ending Euro-American dominance. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) attempted to navigate a “third way,” but parallel participation in the petrodollar-driven “Islamic bloc” by some member countries shredded fragile coalitions behind the scenes. Naeem Mohaiemen's three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) explored a “pivot” moment between the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria and the 1974 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting in Pakistan. The unraveling of old alliances began from a barely discernible Venn diagram overlap between these two groups, one that would take on global significance after the OPEC oil crisis, the Iranian Revolution, and the invasion of Afghanistan. Traveling through the residues of transnational architecture (Niemeyer, Moretti, Le Corbusier) in New York, Algiers, and Dhaka, the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonization, and an always imperfect understanding of socialism. Conversations between Samia Zennadi and Vijay Prashad looked at the contradictions of decolonization movements that revert to reactionary behavior on the “day after” independence. In remembrance of Samia after her tragically early death, Mohaiemen has created a concise visual essay that encapsulates some of her philosophical interventions in the film.