In Lineages of the Present, his first book since the hotly debated In Theory, Aijaz Ahmad untangles many of the intertwined threads of an important story often poorly understood in the metropolitan West: that the right-wing nationalisms now flourishing in many regions of the world did not emerge, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully formed and as if by accident. Their complex genealogies hold the key to comprehending … and ultimately defeating them. Such an understanding is urgently required in India where, Ahmad argues, the BJP's road to power, far from being a temporary detour from the path of secular democracy, may well become a more permanent feature of the country's politics … with dire consequences for the region and the globe.

“At least let it be understood that India bears more ultimate responsibility for the Kashmir troubles than Pakistan, and that the confrontation between India and Pakistan would be a far less dangerous thing had it not been for the BJP's communal thrust at home and its attempt to turn India into a nuclear great power abroad.… Nowhere else in the world, as the left-wing analyst and journalist Aijaz Ahmad says, have nuclear threats been so lightly thrown around.” — Guardian

“Ahmad's voice is one of the most important in the current critical debate on the literature and cultures of Africa and Asia.” — Financial Times

Aijaz Ahmad is Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, India, and Professor of Political Science at York University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of In Theory; Classes, Nations, Literatures, also from Verso, and is an editor, with Fred Pfeil and Modhumita Roy, of the collection A Singular Voice: Collected Writings of Michael Sprinker.