The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
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.
Hardback, 300 pages
ISBN: 9781844679522
March 2013
$26.95 / £16.99 / £28.50
Other Editions
Ebook
ISBN: 9781844679539
March 2013
$26.95
Reviews
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“It is startling how insulated the West has remained from the thinking, achievements, and struggles of the great majority of the world's people. This lucid and well-informed study reveals how much there is to learn from this rich and vibrant record.”
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“At a time when the ideologues of the Washington Consensus appeal to former colonies to free themselves from history, Vijay Prashad recalls a past without which it is impossible to understand the present.”
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“Vijay Prashad is our own Frantz Fanon. His writing of protest is always tinged with the beauty of hope.”
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“Vijay Prashad helps to uncover the shining worlds hidden under official history and dominant media.”
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“Vijay Prashad has courageously and meticulously forged a fascinating study that challenges mainstream, Western narratives of world history. In this provocative and sweeping exploration, the injustices and subjugation of peoples in the global South are not only made visible but political.”
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“With eloquence, wit, and urgency, Prashad tells the real story of global restructuring, the dismantling of the Third World Project, the rise and demise of neoliberalism, and how the future of the planet is tied to the dreams of the dispossessed.”
Blog
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Three articles in praise of The Poorer Nations by Vijay Prashad
"Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance."
Henry Kissinger
Reading Vijay Prahad’s The Poorer Nations is like witnessing the history of a chess game between giants. Sides are composed along geo-political interests: players in the Global North in “a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance” and emerging formations in the Global South, attempting to establish economic and political weight beyond or within US led global market conditions. Yet all the time at the fringes of this game are the movements and ideas which occasionally storm the chessboard and challenge the sovereignty of both sides – this is the ‘possible history’ of the Global South.
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The Lessons of the Global South
Over at Counterpunch, Ron Jacobs reviews Vijay Prashad's book The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Jacobs calls Prashad's work "as detailed and well-cited as anything written by Noam Chomsky," a tale of both fury and hope:Most fundamentally, Prashad’s book is a full frontal assault on neoliberal capitalism. Deservedly, he spares no political party, bank, or government linked to this most devastating edition of capitalism. Whether the collusion was willingly engaged in or merely the result of an unwillingness to lose personal or political power, Prashad paints a sweeping indictment of those who want to rule the earth with little or no regard for most of its inhabitants. While keeping firm hold to his left anti-imperialist foundation, Prashad acknowledges the shortcomings of social democrats in their attempts to compromise with the ravenous beast of neoliberal capital. Naturally, these politicians and parties get some of the blame for the economic devastation caused by the banks and other machinery of that beast; Prashad saves the bulk of the blame, however, for its rightful targets: the IMF, World Bank, finance capital, and the men and women who operate that beast.
Visit Counterpunch to read the review in full. -
The Riddles of Ashis Nandy
When prominent Indian academic Ashis Nandy made a throwaway insulting remark about lower-caste corruption, he found himself served with several arrest warrants. In his latest piece, Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations (publishing next month) asks how free speech can survive in states "clumsy with their enormous power."
Visit Counterpunch to read the article in full.
[Nandy] moved the Indian Supreme Court on grounds that an idea cannot be penalized. The Court responded that if an idea is offensive and creates social harm, there could be a penalty (“Yes, an idea can certainly be punished under the laws. An idea is a summation of verbal acts and it can be penalized”)...
A film is banned, an author is not allowed into a city. These are routine moments in the life of the modern State. Here the example is India. It could be any State...The prosecution of speech is a delicate affair, which in most cases is indelicately handed. It is always good to err on the side of suspicion when a State decides to take in hand the words of a citizen.
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