First published as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, this is a provocative book that deftly cuts through the mythologies of Indian nationalism. The essays and the book have elicited several critical responses from Indian readers; this review concludes with a defense of Anderson’s core project and pace a few of his detractors. Taken together, these essays offer a challenge to Indian intellectuals, particularly of the Left, to break decisively with a set of ideas that make up what Anderson calls the Indian Ideology. The Indian Ideology relies on and reinforces a series of myths that project India as having miraculously achieved what other post-colonial nations have not: a functioning democracy, a secular state, and a united body politic. Anderson’s critique takes in a wide range of scholarship to systematically demolish each one of this triune of cherished myths.
Testimony of a revolutionary
24 November 2014, byDaniel Bensaïd An Impatient Life: A Memoir, Verso: London, 2013; 358 pp: 139781781681084, £25 Reviewed by John McIlroy, Middlesex University, UK for Capital and Class.
Decolonizing North America
9 November 2014, byTwo new books, Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, offer American Indian perspectives on the history of North America.
AIDS Then and Now: A Blood-Drenched Battlefield
5 November 2014, byFor half a century, historian Martin Duberman has been chronicling Black and LGBT lives and struggles from a radical left perspective. Several of his books, notably his masterful biography of Paul Robeson, [1] have linked anti-racism and sexuality in unexpected and illuminating ways.
Sri Lanka: Lessons from the Left
21 October 2014, byA felicitation event for senior activist Santasilan Kadirgamar, held a couple months back at the Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue on August 9, coincided with the launch of an important collection, Pathways of the Left in Sri Lanka, edited by Marshall Fernando and B. Skanthakumar. In the spirit of the above epigraph, the volume provides valuable recognition of the impact the Left has had on Sri Lanka. In terms of the contributions, the essays manage to cover quite a bit of material, all while re-emphasizing common themes in the history of the Left.
Dear Love of Comrades: The politics of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners
8 October 2014, by , ,The film Pride is an extraordinary thing – a Hollywood movie with an enormous budget telling a deeply political story about the most important strike in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain and the mutual solidarity between the strikers and the LGBT community which developed during the course of the dispute.
A readable, robust and unapologetic feminist voice
29 September 2014, byRecognising the book as a valuable and timely contribution to the referendum debate, Sinead notes how the two authors’ approaches fuse to form a readable, robust and unapologetic feminist voice.
Piketty on Capital and Inequality
12 September 2014, byThe issue of growing inequalities of inÂcome and wealth in the advanced capitalist world over the past four decades has been the subject of both social scientific research and political struggle. On the one hand, there is an extensive literature that amply documents the growth of inequality globally since the mid-1970s. While ideologues of neo-liberalism have attempted to dismiss this evidence or diminish its importance, [2] there is a consensus among social scientists that inequality has been on the rise. [3]
One Step Up, Three Steps Down
12 September 2014, byInequality has become a heated political issue with the eruption of the Occupy movement, followed by the spread of minimum wage struggles — including the election of socialist candidate Kshama Sawant to Seattle city council — and union organizing efforts and strikes in the fast food industry and the infamous anti-union Walmart.
The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
8 September 2014, byUp to now, we cannot agree even on how to name the explosion of popular movements in the Arab world from 2011-13 and beyond: Arab Spring, Arab revolution(s), Arab uprising(s)? Indeed, these events are too close to us, are too unfinished, and are too important in terms of their regional and global impact for any such consensus to have formed. What is clear is that these were political revolutions in some cases and that they swept across an entire region, from Morocco to Iraq. Their impact was also global, as seen in the Occupy movement, the Spanish indignados, Gezi Park, and elsewhere.
Footnotes
[1] Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
[2] For the latest attempts to dismiss the overwhelming data on inequality, see Chris Giles, “Piketty Findings Undercut by Errors,” Financial Times, May 23, 2014 and Neil Irwin, “Obama’s Top Economist Has Problems with Piketty’s Book,” New York Times Website, May 7, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/u...
[3] For a synthesis of the research on inequality in the United States, see Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (New York: Sage Publishers, 2014).
