Vijay Prashad

With reference to America's war on Afghanistan post-September 11th.

"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 a reader a sense of what is at stake with a birds-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 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"--Provided by publisher.

“Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, a rash of violence broke out against Sikhs and other South Asians. It was a painful moment of awakening for a diverse group of people who had migrated to the United States since the mid-1960s - and It signaled the start of a more suspicious, and Increasingly fearful, worldview that would drastically change ideas of belonging in America. In UNCLE SWAMI, Vijay Prashad continues the conversation sparked by his celebrated book The Karma of Brown Folk - a clear-sighted assessment of a fast-changing people and world” (Times Literary Supplement) – confronting the experience of migration across an expanse of generations and class, from the birth of political activism among second-generation immigrants and the meteoric rise of South Asian American politicians In Republican circles to new waves of migrant workers who scrape by at the mercy of the American free market. With Prushad’s trademark passion and depth of thinking, UNCLE SWAMI is a powerful assessment of cultural and racial politics in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.” BOOK JACKET

"The Sun Never Sets collects the work of a generation of scholars who are enacting a shift in the orientation of the field of South Asian American studies. By focusing upon the lives, work, and activism of specific, often unacknowledged, migrant populations, the contributors present a more comprehensive vision of the South Asian presence in the United States. Tracking the changes in global power that have influenced the paths and experiences of migrants, from expatriate Indian maritime workers at the turn of the century, to Indian nurses during the Cold War, to post-9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the crossfire of the "War on Terror," these essays reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialism. Driven by a shared sense of responsibility among the contributing scholars to alter the profile of South Asian migrants in the American public imagination, they address the key issues that impact these migrants in the U.S., on the subcontinent, and in circuits of the transnational economy. Taken together, these essays provide tools with which to understand the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the place of South Asian migrants within it."--Publisher's website.

""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 challenges the arguments made by Dinesh D'Souza, who heralds South Asian success in the United States, and questions the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others who Prashad terms "Godmen" shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians. Tracing the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad illustrates 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."--BOOK JACKET.

On American foreign policy.

"In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica's Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney's Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects--the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism--Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion."--Provided by publisher.

" The Arab Spring unleashed forces of liberation and social justice that swept across North Africa and the Middle East with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and excitement. Although the future of the democratic uprisings against oppressive authoritarian regimes remains uncertain in many places, the revolutionary wave that started in Tunisia in December 2010 has transformed how the world sees Arab peoples and politics. Bringing together the knowledge of activists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts uniquely attuned to the pulse of the region, Dispatches from the Arab Spring offers an urgent and engaged analysis of a remarkable ongoing world-historical event that is widely misinterpreted in the West. Tracing the flows of protest, resistance, and counterrevolution in every one of the countries affected by this epochal change--from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Sudan--the contributors provide ground-level reports and new ways of teaching about and understanding the Middle East in general, and contextualizing the social upheavals and political transitions that defined the Arab Spring in particular. Rejecting outdated and invalid (yet highly influential) paradigms to analyze the region--from depictions of the "Arab street" as a mindless, reactive mob to the belief that Arab culture was "unfit" for democratic politics--this book offers fresh insights into the region's dynamics, drawing from social history, political geography, cultural creativity, and global power politics. Dispatches from the Arab Spring is an unparalleled introduction to the changing Middle East and offers the most comprehensive and accurate account to date of the uprisings that profoundly reshaped North Africa and the Middle East. Contributors: Sheila Carapico, U of Richmond; Nouri Gana, UCLA; Toufic Haddad; Adam Hanieh, SOAS/U of London; Toby C. Jones, Rutgers U; Anjali Kamat; Khalid Medani, McGill U; Merouan Mekouar; Maya Mikdashi, NYU; Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto, U Federal Fluminense, Brazil; Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College, CUNY; Ahmad Shokr; Susan Slyomovics, UCLA; Haifa Zangana. "--

"This book traces this swelling recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and hopeful. Some of the leading American writers of our time, such as Junot Diaz and Teju Cole, along with musicians like Chuck D and Palestinian American artists like Naomi Shihab Nye, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity - and anger at US support for Israeli policy - in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems."--Back cover.

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, issuebased 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.

"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 Chi 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"--