Vijay Prashad – författare

An intimate conversation between towering public intellectuals examining the contentious interplay between the Cuban Revolution and U.S. empireAn audacious revolutionary experiment in the backyard of empire, Cuba has occupied a vexed role in the international order for decades. Though its doctors (and fighters)—and the outsized influence of its example—have traversed the globe, from Venezuela to Angola, its political and economic future remain uncertain as the Castro era comes to a close and the U.S. embargo proceeds unabated.Through an intimate conversation between two of the country’s most astute observers of international politics, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba traces Cuban history from the early days of the 1950s revolution to the present, interrogating U.S. interventions and extracting lessons on U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere along the way. Neither a jingoistic condemnation nor an uncritical celebration, Chomsky’s heterodox approach to world affairs is on full display as he and Prashad grapple with Cuba’s unique place on the international scene.In a media landscape saturated with half-truths and fake news, Chomsky and Prashad—“our own Frantz Fanon . . . [whose] writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope” (Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana)—seek to shed light on the truth of a complex and perennially controversial nation, while examining the limits of mainstream media discourse.

Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book-a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs.

Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book-a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs.

This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird's-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. "The Arab Spring was defeated neither in the byways of Tahrir Square nor in the souk of Aleppo," he explains. "It was defeated roundly in the palaces of Riyadh and Ankara as well as in Washington, DC and Paris." The heart of this book explores the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon-countries where ISIS emerged and is thriving. It is here that the story of the region rests. What would a post-ISIS Middle East look like? Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies?Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions.

Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book’s claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book—a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs.

This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird's-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. “The Arab Spring was defeated neither in the byways of Tahrir Square nor in the souk of Aleppo,” he explains. “It was defeated roundly in the palaces of Riyadh and Ankara as well as in Washington, DC and Paris.”   The heart of this book explores the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—countries where ISIS emerged and is thriving. It is here that the story of the region rests. What would a post-ISIS Middle East look like? Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies? Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions.

From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. The Revolution proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but also form an opposing government in their own image. The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiplying revolutions across the globe.This book explains the ideological power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minh to Fidel Castro, to reflections on polycentric Communism and collective memories of Communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible.It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope – that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolutionary spirit for the working class and peasantry in the parts of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination for centuries.

Village Voice Favorite Books of 2000The popular book challenging the idea of a model minority, now in paperback!“How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W. E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians “How does it feel to be a solution?” In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a “model minority”-one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as "a weapon in the war against black America."On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the “model minority” image, that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant, and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh D’Souza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms “Godmen” shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians. Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India’s effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar’s influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance.The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the “model minority” myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism. Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community-in short, how Americans define themselves.

Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about U.S. imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair—a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people’s movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso—also assassinated—who said: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.” Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.

Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about U.S. imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair—a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people’s movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso—also assassinated—who said: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.” Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.

Two of our most celebrated intellectuals grapple with the uncertain aftermath of the American collapse in Afghanistan“Through the structure of a deeply engaging conversation between two of our most important contemporary public intellectuals, we are urged to defy the inattention of the media to the disastrous damage inflicted in Afghanistan on life, land, and resources in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal and the connections to the equally avoidable and unnecessary wars on Iraq and Libya.”—from the foreword by Angela Y. DavisNot since the last American troops left Vietnam have we faced such a sudden vacuum in our foreign policy—not only of authority, but also of explanations of what happened, and what the future holds.Few analysts are better poised to address this moment than Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, intellectuals and critics whose work spans generations and continents. Called “the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet” by the New York Times Book Review, Noam Chomsky is the guiding light of dissidents around the world. In The Withdrawal, Chomsky joins with noted scholar Vijay Prashad—who “helps to uncover the shining worlds hidden under official history and dominant media” (Eduardo Galeano)—to get at the roots of this unprecedented time of peril and change.Chomsky and Prashad interrogate key inflection points in America’s downward spiral: from the disastrous Iraq War to the failed Libyan intervention to the descent into chaos in Afghanistan.As the final moments of American power in Afghanistan fade from view, this crucial book argues that we must not take our eyes off the wreckage—and that we need, above all, an unsentimental view of the new world we must build together.

The landmark alternative history of the Cold War from the perspective of the Global South, reissued in paperback with a new introduction by the authorIn this award-winning investigation into the overlooked history of the Third World—with a new preface by the author for its fifteenth anniversary—internationally renowned historian Vijay Prashad conjures what Publishers Weekly calls “a vital assertion of an alternative future.” The Darker Nations, praised by critics as a welcome antidote to apologists for empire, has defined for a generation of scholars, activists, and dreamers what it is to imagine a more just international order and continues to offer lessons for the radical political projects of today.With the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rise of India and China on the global scene, this paradigm-shifting book of groundbreaking scholarship helps us envision the future of the Global South by restoring to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced an impoverished and asymmetrical international political arena. No other book on the Third World—as a utopian idea and a global movement—can speak so effectively and engagingly to our troubled times.

An intimate conversation between towering public intellectuals examining the contentious interplay between the Cuban Revolution and U.S. empireAn audacious revolutionary experiment in the backyard of empire, Cuba has occupied a vexed role in the international order for decades. Though its doctors (and fighters)—and the outsized influence of its example—have traversed the globe, from Venezuela to Angola, its political and economic future remain uncertain as the Castro era comes to a close and the U.S. embargo proceeds unabated.Through an intimate conversation between two of the country''s most astute observers of international politics, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba traces Cuban history from the early days of the 1950s revolution to the present, interrogating U.S. interventions and extracting lessons on U.S. power and influence in the Western Hemisphere along the way. Neither a jingoistic condemnation nor an uncritical celebration, Chomsky''s heterodox approach to world affairs is on full display as he and Prashad grapple with Cuba''s unique place on the international scene.In a media landscape saturated with half-truths and fake news, Chomsky and Prashad—"our own Frantz Fanon . . . [whose] writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope" (Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana)—seek to shed light on the truth of a complex and perennially controversial nation, while examining the limits of mainstream media discourse.

An incisive and inspiring call to look beyond capitalism to chart a road map for a planet ravaged by pandemics, climate crisis, and wars.Prompted by trenchant questions by international solidarity organizer Frank Barat, renowned author and activist Vijay Prashad shows that the path toward hope and liberation lies in looking closely at myriad, under covered struggles being waged all across the world by workers in countries such as India, Kenya, Peru, Tunisia, and Argentina. A marvelously global but grassroots perspective.Prashad also examines pressing topics such as debt cancellation, a wealth tax, austerity, the pandemic, the arms industry, the climate crisis, socialism, working-class social movements and much more.

An incisive and inspiring call to look beyond capitalism to chart a road map for a planet ravaged by pandemics, climate crisis, and wars.Prompted by trenchant questions by international solidarity organizer Frank Barat, renowned author and activist Vijay Prashad shows that the path toward hope and liberation lies in looking closely at myriad, under covered struggles being waged all across the world by workers in countries such as India, Kenya, Peru, Tunisia, and Argentina. A marvelously global but grassroots perspective.Prashad also examines pressing topics such as debt cancellation, a wealth tax, austerity, the pandemic, the arms industry, the climate crisis, socialism, working-class social movements and much more.

In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off.Since the '70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival-in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism.In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad "has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today's global situation and standoff." The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.

In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off.Since the ''70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival-in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism.In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad "has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today''s global situation and standoff." The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel's seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths-and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel's actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites.This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot Díaz and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity-as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy-in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel''s seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths-and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel''s actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites.This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot D�az and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity-as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy-in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.

From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. The Revolution proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but also form an opposing government in their own image. The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiplying revolutions across the globe.This book explains the ideological power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minh to Fidel Castro, to reflections on polycentric Communism and collective memories of Communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible.It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope – that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolutionary spirit for the working class and peasantry in the parts of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination for centuries.

The world watched as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter.