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The Darker Nations

A People's History of the Third World

ebook
1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available

The landmark alternative history of the Cold War from the perspective of the Global South, reissued in paperback with a new introduction by the author
In this award-winning investigation into the overlooked history of the Third World—with a new preface by the author for its fifteenth anniversary—internationally renowned historian Vijay Prashad conjures what Publishers Weekly calls "a vital assertion of an alternative future." The Darker Nations, praised by critics as a welcome antidote to apologists for empire, has defined for a generation of scholars, activists, and dreamers what it is to imagine a more just international order and continues to offer lessons for the radical political projects of today.

With the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rise of India and China on the global scene, this paradigm-shifting book of groundbreaking scholarship helps us envision the future of the Global South by restoring to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced an impoverished and asymmetrical international political arena. No other book on the Third World—as a utopian idea and a global movement—can speak so effectively and engagingly to our troubled times.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 11, 2006
      Scholarly but accessible, this history of Third World intellectual
      \t\t thought and politics captures the shared ideals, institutions and strategies
      \t\t that have united the Latin American countries and the new Asian and African
      \t\t states that have stood outside U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence since WWII.
      \t\t This Third World project did more than steer a neutral course between the
      \t\t nuclear-armed contenders of the Cold War era, claims Prashad (The Karma of Brown Folk). Anticolonial nationalism was
      \t\t also the basis for an alternative world order premised on peace, autonomy and
      \t\t cooperation. But Third World unity was also fragile. The optimism of newly
      \t\t independent nation-states that shaped the United Nations into their principal
      \t\t global platform gave way after the 1960s to frustration, conflict, compromised
      \t\t sovereignty and diminishing expectations. Prashad reveals the close
      \t\t interrelations among such obstacles as the persistence of old social
      \t\t hierarchies, the mobilization of religious views and reinvented tribalism, and
      \t\t punishing debt burdens designed to maintain Western hegemony over a
      \t\t "developing" world. Indeed, he argues, "cultural nationalism" easily becomes
      \t\t "the Trojan-horse of IMF-driven globalization." While the subtitle is
      \t\t misleading—Prashad necessarily concentrates on towering figures like India's
      \t\t Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and Egypt's Nasser—the book offers a vital
      \t\t assertion of an alternative future, grounded in an anti-imperial vision.
      \t\t

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  • English

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