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Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New Press People's Histories)
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Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New Press People's Histories)
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by Vijay Prashad and Howard Zinn
Sales Rank : 21430
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Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: New Press; Reprint edition April 1, 2008
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1595583424
ISBN-13: 978-1595583420
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 6 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Scholarly but accessible, this history of Third World intellectual thought and politics captures the shared ideals, institutions and strategies that have united the Latin American countries and the new Asian and African states that have stood outside U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence since WWII. This Third World project did more than steer a neutral course between the nuclear-armed contenders of the Cold War era, claims Prashad (The Karma of Brown Folk). Anticolonial nationalism was also the basis for an alternative world order premised on peace, autonomy and cooperation. But Third World unity was also fragile. The optimism of newly independent nation-states that shaped the United Nations into their principal global platform gave way after the 1960s to frustration, conflict, compromised sovereignty and diminishing expectations. Prashad reveals the close interrelations among such obstacles as the persistence of old social hierarchies, the mobilization of religious views and reinvented tribalism, and punishing debt burdens designed to maintain Western hegemony over a "developing" world. Indeed, he argues, "cultural nationalism" easily becomes "the Trojan-horse of IMF-driven globalization." While the subtitle is misleading—Prashad necessarily concentrates on towering figures like India's Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and Egypt's Nasser—the book offers a vital assertion of an alternative future, grounded in an anti-imperial vision. (Feb.)
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
An alternative Account of the Cold War from the point of the view of the world's poor"The first comprehensive political history of the third world as concept and as project" Immanuel Wallerstein).
"The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers."Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
A landmark work from a brilliant young scholar, The Darker Nations chronicles the rise and fall of the Third World. Its hardcover publication was hailed by renowned scholar Immanuel Wallerstein as "essential background for rethinking history." Publishers Weekly recognized its relevance for global activists today, noting its "vital assertion of an alternative future, grounded in an anti-imperialist vision."
Brilliantly tracing the hopes of this decades-long global movement, its limitations, and its ultimate downfall in the 1980s, Prashad reconstructs the fascinating prehistory of the Third World, recalling the now-forgotten 1927 Brussels conclave of the League Against Imperialisman international effort that brought Albert Einstein together with Jawaharlal Nehru, Madame Sun Yat-Sen, and hundreds of other far-flung revolutionaries. The book also offers a striking new analysis of the 1955 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where twenty-nine African and Asian countriesand Third World giants like India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser, and Indonesia's Sukarnolaunched the Third World project.
Elegiac, combative, revisionist, incisiveand recalling the vivid thoughts and words of scores of extraordinary intellectuals, artists, and freedom fightersThe Darker Nations is destined to become a classic.
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